Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups and Teams

Assignment Task

Teams consisting of two or three students will be required to work a comprehensive simulation project. Each student team must select a service organization and find an opportunity to simulate staffing requirements for a service provided by that organization. Typical opportunities for this project may be found in a large bank, a call center, a large grocery store, a department store, an airline check-in counter, a large post office, a customer support department, or a repair service.

The term project should address the following issues. ·

1. Does the current staffing practice at different time of day or week lead to too much waiting by customers or too much idle time by servers?

2. How do similar organizations make such decisions? (Industry Research) · What would be the desired utilization of servers and desired waiting time (for example, x percent of the customers should not wait more than y minutes)?

3. Are there any restrictions on number of servers, number of queues, length of queue (for example limited number of calls that can be kept on hold), and processing priorities?

4. What is the probability distribution of time between arrivals during different hours of a typical week? (If the data is available from an available database kept by the organization, the teams should use at least 30 weeks of hourly data. If the data will be collected manually by the team, then five weeks of data for peak hours and off-peak hours would be sufficient.) Use Risk’s fitting ability to identify the best probability distribution to fit your data.

5. What is the probability distribution service for each (or for each class of) customer? Collect service times for at least 100 customers of each type and then use Risk’s fitting ability to find the best fitting service time.

6. Should we consider the cost of each server, the cost of customer waiting time, and the cost of lost customers? If yes, estimate these costs. List all the assumptions used in estimating.

7. Simulate using Risk at least 500 trials for distinct hours of the week to determine the optimal number of servers required. If costs are not relevant, then the optimal number would be lowest number of servers that meet the design waiting time criteria.

8. Consolidate the staffing recommendations for each hour for the whole week and analyze to see if it makes sense.

9. How can the organization best use your results? Does it make sense for this organization to utilize part-time workers or use other cross-trained staff during peak periods?

10. How will your solution change if the load on the system changes?

11. What are the benefits of using the proposed solution compared to base case or doing nothing?

12. Will the organization use your recommendation?

In addition to a written report, each team will be required to make a presentation to the class to discuss key issues and results. The report should contain a complete description of the current environment, design criteria and constraints, data collection procedure including current costs or any other performance measures, and all the assumptions. Simulate as stated above and develop a recommendation. Prepare an implantation plan and try to get feedback from the selected organization about your plan. Submit a formal report (no minimum or maximum limit) to show what was done. The main body of the report should be concise and it should emphasize the key issues shown above. Use appendices to show your summary data and other details. For the PowerPoint presentation, make sure that you do not put too much material on one slide otherwise we will not be able to read it. Emphasize how you identified the opportunity, how you collected the data, and what are the major benefits of using the term project.

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