Reference no: EM132252243

A small business school has assigned a secretary to each of its four departments: accounting, finance, decision technology, and management. The secretaries type class materials and correspondence only for their own departmental faculty. The dean has received complaints from the faculty about delays in getting work accomplished, particularly from the accounting faculty. The dean assigns an assistant to collect data on arrival rates and service times. Upon analyzing the data, the assistant reports that secretarial work arrives with a Poisson distribution at an average rate of 2 requests per hour for all departments except accounting, which has an average rate of 3 requests per hour. The average time to complete a piece of work is 15 minutes, regardless of its source, and these times are exponentially distributed.

Because of budgeting limitations no additional secretaries can be hired. The dean believes the service could be improved if all the secretaries were pooled and instructed to receive work from the entire business school faculty. All work requests would be received at one central location and processed on a first-come, first-served basis by the first secretary that becomes available regardless of departmental affiliation. Before proposing the plan to the faculty, the dean asks the assistant who collected the data to analyze and compare the performance of the existing system with the pooling alternative.