A small business school has assigned a secretary to each of its four departments: accounting, finance, marketing, and management. Each secretary prepares class materials and correspondence only f other or his own departmental faculty. The dean has received complaints from the faculty. The assistant reports that secretarial work arrives with a Poisson distribution at an average rate of λ= 3 requests per hour for all departments except accounting with an average rate of λ= 4. The average time to complete a piece of work is 10 minutes regardless of its source, and the service times are distributed exponentially. All the secretaries were pooled and instructed to receive work from the entire business school faculty. The present system is four M/M/1 independent, single-channel queuing. Should we accept the new proposal?
a. approximately 3 customers; lambda is about 2.33 customers/hour
b. No; the substantial reduction in expected turnaround time is approximately to 20 minutes.