Goals of this lesson
- Learn what the basic load feature of a resource is used for and how to assign it
In business processes there are usually resources involved that work off incoming customer requests, but still need to handle other labor, that also needs to be done. Imagine an it-administrator who is part of the software-developer team of a company, but who also needs to take phone calls from customers. We do not want to discuss, whether this work-sharing is a sensible approach, but it is common in a lot of companies. On days with a high customer inquiry traffic the developer simply has cut off the service duties in order to keep up with his job's software-development part. We call this a resource's basic load.
Model 16 from figure 1 depicts the aforementioned circumstance: An IT-administrator belongs to a software-developer team, but he also has to work off incoming customer inquiries. Since he must fulfill his duties on the software-development team, he must make himself unavailable for the customer service, which can be done by assigning a basic load to its resource properties.
How-to
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Figure 1: Model 16 - Basic Load
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Approach
- We will use Organization Diagram X from model 15 (see figure 2)
- Chris and Joe belong to Annette's division and form Company X's developer team
- They also have to attend to customer inquiries
- On days with a high inquiry traffic they will need to cut off their customer service duties to fulfill their development tasks
- Select Chris or Joe
- You will notice that there is a check box called Has Basic Load (see figure 3)
- Check it and you will notice that two more options appear: Available Working Time and Basic Load Duration (see figure 3)
- Available Working Time specifies the time span, after which the resource starts to work on its basic tasks. You could also call it the inter-arrival time for the basic load. But we called it Available Working Time because it represents the time, in which the resource can be assigned to other duties.
- Basic Load Duration indicates the duration of the basic load.
- So, when the time span given in Available Working Time passes, the basic load status is being initiated for the given duration, in which the resource will not be available to any process instance.
- In this case we assigned the following distributions for:
- Chris
- Available Working Time: Normal Distribution with a mean value of 1 hour and a standard deviation of 5 minutes
- Basic Load Duration: Continuous Uniform Distribution with a lower border of 2 hours and an upper border of 3 hours
- Joe
- Available Working Time: Continuous Uniform Distribution with a lower border of 1 hour and an upper border of 2 hours
- Basic Load Duration: Continuous Uniform Distribution with a lower border of 2 hours and an upper border of 3 hours
- Finally we assign the role Administrator to model 16's activity
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Figure 2: Model 16 - Organization Diagram
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Figure 3: Chris' simulation properties
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Explanation
We assigned a basic load to both Administrators. Let's have a look at the report.
