Reference no: EM133907129
Operations and Business Process Management
Question 1 Requests to watch content received by a Video-on-Demand service are sent as packets to a data center that provides media servers to deliver content. Packets arrive at the data center at the rate of 41987 packets per second. Each server can provide bandwidth to deliver 700 packets per second. There are 60 servers. There is variability in both the interarrival time between packets and the service time.
Therefore, we assume Ca=1 and Cs=1. What is the average wait time experienced by a packet?
There appears to be enough capacity to serve 700*60=42000 packets per second which is more than the arrival rate. Still, there may be waiting. Please explain in your own words why there is waiting in this situation.
Question 2
My-law.com is a recent start-up serving customers in search of legal services in two areas -property law and family law. New customers are encouraged to send emails to the inbox [email protected] and put either property law or family law in the subject line. There are always two lawyers "on call," one property lawyer and the other family lawyer, available to answer emails. Whenever the property lawyer completes a conversation and becomes free, s/he picks up the oldest email with the subject property law in the inbox. Family lawyer does the same thing with family law emails.
E-mails with property in subject line arrive at an average rate of 8 e-mails per hours. E-mails with family in subject line also arrive at an average rate of 8 e-mails per hours. It takes one lawyer (property or family), on average, 6 minutes to write the response e-mail. Assume Ca=1 and Cs=1.
What is the average total time (lead time) it takes a property law customer to get a response to his/her e-mail? (Note: The lead time includes the time an email waits as well as the actual writing time. Treat two flows (property and family) separately. Answer will be the same for each flow.)
Question 3
Continuing from the previous question and focusing only on property law email traffic, there is an increase in demand. If the arrival rate goes up to 48 per hour and the firm hires 4 more resources (to make a total of 5 resources for property law), what is the average wait time for property law emails?
Show all inputs. Continuing from the previous questions means that any inputs or context that are not specifically mentioned in this question should be taken from the previous question.
Question 4 Continuing from the previous question, further analysis shows that new traffic exhibits different variability. New measurements of the standard deviation of the property email interarrival time show it to be 0.029375 hrs. What is the average wait time? Note that the mean of interarrival time is 1/arrival rate. Show all inputs.
Question 5 Continuing from the previous question, just consider property law flow. To increase the responsiveness of the firm, the board of My-law.com proposes a new operating policy of highly standardizing the response. This standardization will reduce the standard deviation of the writing time of response e-mail to 3 minutes. The mean of service time remains the same 6 minutes. There is no change in the arrival process. Due to this idea, what is new average total time it takes a customer to get a response? Boost your grades with expert-level assignment help today.
Question 6 Continuing from the previous question, the firm can increase the service rate of all resources by 0.4 per hour by purchasing access to an online database at the total cost of $400 per hour. The customer waiting cost is estimated to be $20 per hour per customer and this cost is charged only on wait times. Should the firm purchase this access? Please show all work.
Question 7 Baria Planning Solutions case is available in the Harvard case pack. In Quiz 2, you have already identified different types of flow-units, different-types of resource-types (stations), and the number of resources of each type. Now please identify the average service time and Cs at each station. Please explain in words, what approach will you use to compute the turnaround time in this case?Also, please write two specific process improvement ideas that you would suggest to improve turnaround time. In Session 6, we will ask you to share these ideas with your team and then your team will share its ideas with the class.