1. Session 10: Business Process Simulation
Richard Welke
Director, CEPRIN
Professor, CIS
Robinson College of Business
Georgia State University
Atlanta, GA

2. In-Class Simulation Exercise
Scenario
After Inc is a software company with a substantial customer service activity
It handles the majority of these calls themselves, but outsources the remainder to another company: NFLEX, Inc
NFLEX costs a bit more/call but also processes the calls more quickly
Issue
Customer service waiting times are becoming rather long and customers are complaining
Given the relative costs of the two options, what should After Inc do to improve overall customer average waiting time to half their current values?
At the least cost, of course 

3. Innov8 As-Is Business Process

4. Specifying the simulation parameters
Place in “Simulation View”
Setup resources
We’ll create
We’ll initially use a 61/39 split on AfterInc/NFLEX call direction

5. Cost, resource and timing data (from game)
What should we assume about the distribution of arrivals?
What should we assume about the distribution of service times?

6. Cost, resource and timing data (our variant)
4.8/minute = 1 every minutes
Negative exponential distribution wants the mean inter-arrival rate

7. Setting up for simulation (3)
Adding service time distribution information to each task

8. Setting up for simulation (4)
Adding arrival time distribution information to the start activity
Save and run …

9. Running the simulation - results

10. Your challenge …
Find the least cost solution to reducing the overall average throughput time to 5 minutes or less
The average wait time for each of the two queues should also be under 5 minutes
Question:
What strategy should you follow to create alternative scenarios?
E.g.,
Shift proportion to lowest cost provider (change gateway percentages on each branch)?
Selectively increase/decrease the number of providers
Other?