SimQuick engineering project

1. (15%) Give a brief definition of “Human Factors Engineering.” In your own words, explain how it is related to industrial engineering. 2. (15%) Give a brief definition of “Operations Research”. In your own words, explain how it is related to industrial engineering. 3. (15%) Give a brief definition of “Quality Control.” In your own words, explain how it is related to industrial engineering. 4. (15%) Give a brief definition of “Supply Chain Management.” In your own words, explain how it is related to industrial engineering. 5. (40%) Your company operates a call center that runs for an 8 hour shift per day taking customer calls with product questions, ordering issues, etc. The current call volume is approximately 20 calls per hour (modelled using an Exponential distribution with a mean of 3 minutes). The call center currently has 10 phone lines, so it can handle at most 10 calls at once. If a customer calls and all 10 lines are in use (either with an agent or on hold), then the customer gets a busy signal and must call back later. If a call arrives and fewer than 10 lines are in use, then the call go directly to a customer service agent (CS), if available, or is put on hold. A typical call time can be approximated by a Normal distribution with a mean of 3 minutes and standard deviation of 2 minutes. There are occasions when the CS agents can’t resolve the callers concern and the call must be forwarded to a CS Supervisor (currently approximately 30% of the time). When this happens a typical supervisor call time can be approximated by a Normal distribution with a mean of 8 minutes and standard deviation of 3 minutes. The following figure represents the process flow for the call center. Analyze the current configuration using the provided SimQuick model. The SimQuick model is configured to automatically run 5 CS staffing level scenarios (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 CS agents), so you will see results by Scenario (each column) and they just happen to correspond to the number of CS agents employed! Determine the system performance in terms of customer service level, CS agent and supervisor utilization (also look at time blocked for additional insight), customer wait time and number of customers waiting (simulating an 8 hour days for 100 replications). What can you conclude about how to staff and operate the current situation? What is an acceptable level of customer service / wait time? What other information would you need to fully analyze the situation?