In: Operations Management
1) In a service system with impatient customers, is 1/a (1/interarrival time) the same as the flow rate? please explain.
What is flow rate ?
- The number of flow units,
for example-customers, money, produced goods or services going
through the business process per unit time, for example- served
customers per hour or produced parts per minute. The flow rate is
an average rate. It is also called as throughput.
Flow rate formula - Inventory/Flow time
If a company produces 1000 chaires in 10 days.
1000/10 = 100 chairs ( Flow rate)
What is interval-arrival time ?
-
If 12
customers enter a store per hour, the time between every arrival
is-
1/12= 0.083 hours.
0.083 hours multiplied by 60 minutes = 5 minutes.
It means the
arrival rate of 12 per hour, the time between each arrival is 5
minutes.
From the above 2 examples, it can be observed that both of
them are similiar in formula but interval-arrival-time is
calculated in time units (minutes) . Whereas, flow rate is
calculated in of number of units produced in particular period of
time.