SCM3102: Management of Service Operations
Simio Group Assignment
Consider simple bank operations with two types of customers: Standard and Preferred.
Preferred customers are more valuable from the bank’s perspective as they usually
have higher balances in their accounts and/or pay higher fees for bank services. The
bank operates for 8 hours a day with 6 cashiers available at all times. Currently the
bank has two cashiers allocated to serve Preferred customers while the remaining 4
deal with standard customers (therefore, customers form two queues: one queue for
Preferred, one queue for Standard).
The number of Standard customers per hour follows a Poisson distribution with a
mean of 12, while the number of Preferred customers arriving per hour can be
modeled as a Poisson distribution with a mean of 6. Service time for both types of
customers follows exponential distribution with a mean of 10 minutes.
(a) Create a simulation model for the current scenario, assuming the bank operates
8 hours per day and the demand rate does not change over time. Run 1000
replications of the model to find average time in system for Standard and
Preferred customers, average queue lengths for each type of cashiers, and
cashier utilization.
(b) Should the bank change the allocation of cashiers (keep in mind that the bank
wants to keep the total number of cashiers constant)?
(c) Should the bank change the queue configuration? If so, how?
(d) Bonus question: Assume that the bank wants to keep the current configuration
with 2 queues; however, it wants to allow Preferred customers to use Standard
service channel if there are no Standard customers waiting for service. In this
modified scenario, what is your recommended cashier allocation?
Hint: You will need to create an add-on process that checks if the Standard
service queue is equal to 0, checks whether there’s a Preferred customer
waiting, and if so, removes the Preferred Customer from his queue and routes
him to the Standard service channel. To find the Preferred customer to
transfer, you need to use a ‘Search’ step in the add-on process.
Your assignment will be judged based on the model correctness (45%), your analysis
(50%), and Simio graphics (5%).