ARENA SIMULATION

Industrial and Systems Engineering

Consider a clinical business process situation where jobs arrive with a varying mean rate following the
Poisson distribution per the table below:

Time Period 9 AM – 11:59 AM 12 PM – 1:59 PM 2 PM – 5 PM

Average rate per hour 8 2 5

A job needs to be worked on by the associate clerk (Mary) for the chart completion and then must get
approved by Mary’s boss (Charles) before the job is considered completed and done. Upon initial work
by Mary, the job is passed to Charles for a quick review, approval, and routing for the next step.
However, Charles has many duties, and his schedule allows for up to five 5 reviews and approvals in
any one-hour period, during the 8-hour workday, that he makes available for that set of activity.
Accordingly, Mary provides up to five jobs to Charles every hour. Any job left at the end of the day at
Mary’s desk gets slated for the next business day.

The overall job’s duration with Mary is best described by an exponential distribution with a mean of 10
minutes. The time a job spends with Charles follows the uniform distribution of (2, 3) minutes. There
is sufficient room for jobs to wait for their turn to be processed.

Design and develop a simulation model of this process as is for a potential process redesign. Run your
model of 8 hours and review and interpret the results.