Model 16 - Basic Load

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

Model 16
Figure 1. Model 16 - Basic Load

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

Model 16 orga
Figure 2. Model 16 - Organization Diagram
Model 16 orga properties1
Figure 3. Chris' simulation properties

Explanation

We assigned a basic load to both Administrators. Let’s have a look at the report.

Report

See below for the run configuration, which we set up to receive the report statistics from below.

Please refer to the section Experiment Results for more information on the report specific data.

Run configuration

  • Stochastic Seed: 12345

  • Simulation start date: 1/1/2014 12:00:00 a.m.

  • Simulation stop time: 240

  • Simulation stop time unit: Hours

Report statistics

  • Figure 4 shows us the role Administrator has been in use for 359.68 hours

  • But the interesting part is that it dedicated 116.93 hours to its basic load

Model 16 resource stats
Figure 4. Resource statistics for Administrator

Explore

Try to increase or decrease one of the Basic Load elements of one of the Administrators to see the effect of the Basic Load feature on the process' cycle time.