Let us consider the following process performed by an IT helpdesk that handles requests from clients. The clients are employees of a company. There are about 500 employees in total. A request may be an IT-related problem of a client or an access request (e.g., requesting rights to access a system). Requests need to be handled according to their type and their priority. There are three priority levels: critical, urgent, or normal. The current process works as follows. A client calls the help desk or sends an email in order to make a request. The help desk is staffed with 5 Level-1 support staff who, typically, are junior people with less than 12 months experience, but are capable of resolving known problems and simple requests. The hourly cost of a Level-1 staff member is e 40. When the Level-1 employee does not know the resolution to a request, the request is forwarded to a more experienced Level-2 support staff. There are 3 Level-2 staff members and their hourly cost is e 60. When a Level-2 employee receives a new request, he or she evaluates it in order to assign a priority level. The ticketing system that tracks the process will later assign the request to the same or to another Level-2 staff depending on the assigned priority level and the backlog of requests. Once the request is assigned to a Level-2 staff member, the request is researched by the Level-2 employee and a resolution is developed and sent back to the Level-1 employee. Eventually, the Level-1 employee forwards the resolution to the client who tests the resolution. The client notifies the outcome of the test to the Level-1 employee via email. If the client states that the request is fixed, it is marked as complete and the process ends. If the request is not fixed, it is resent to Level-2 support for further action and goes through the process again. Requests are registered in a ticketing system. The ticketing system allows help desk employees to record the details of the request, the priority level and the name of the client who generated the request. When a request is registered, it is marked as open. When it is moved to Level-2, it is marked as forwarded to Level-2. When the resolution is sent back to Level-1, the request is marked as returned to Level-1. Finally, when a request is resolved, it is marked as closed. Every request has a unique identifier. When a request is registered, the ticketing system sends an email to the client. The email includes a so-called request reference number that the client needs to quote when asking questions about the request. Calculate the cycle time efficiency and the cost-per-execution of the as-is process assuming that: Submitting and registering a new request takes 5 min on average. Requests spend on average 1 h waiting for a Level-1 staff member to check them. This applies both to new requests and to resubmitted requests. Checking if a new request is known takes on average 10 min. In 20% of the cases, the request is known. In this case, it takes between 2 and 10 min (average 5 min) for the Level-1 staff member to communicate the resolution to the client. Once this is done, the request is marked as closed. On the other hand, if the request is not known, the request is automatically forwarded to Level-2. New requests spend on average 2 h waiting for a Level-2 staff member to evaluate them. Level-2 staff take on average 20 min to evaluate a new request. Level-2 staff take 5 min to prioritize a request. The time between the moment a request has been prioritized and the moment the request is picked up by a Level-2 staff member is 20 h. The time required to research and resolve a request is on average 2 h. The time to write the resolution to a request is on average 20 min. Once a Level-2 staff member has written the resolution of a request, it takes on average 20 h before a the request is fetched from the ticketing system by a Level- 1 staff member. It takes on average 20 min for a Level-1 staff member to send to the client a problem resolution previously written by a Level-2 staff member. It takes on average 20 h between the moment a resolution is sent by the Level-1 staff member and the moment the resolution is tested by the client. It takes the client around 10 min to email the test results to the Level-1 staff. In 20% of the cases, the request is not resolved and it needs to be forwarded to Level-2 again. In this latter case, it takes about 2 min for the Level-1 staff to forward the request to the Level-2 staff. Unresolved requests that are forwarded in this way are automatically marked as prioritized, since they have already been prioritized in the previous iteration. There are no other costs besides the resource costs. Hint To calculate theoretical cycle time and cost, only take into consideration time spent doing actual work, excluding waiting times and handoffs.

Model and simulate it assuming that cases arrive at a rate of 50 per day according to an exponential distribution. Assume that all the task cycle times follow an exponential distribution with the average given.