Centrals Purchasing unit accepts requests from the warehouse and marketing for finding and ordering products and components at the best price the market has to offer at the time. There is just one person in purchasing who handles these internal calls and this is not her only job. Some of the orders are complex, many are new,so the time to service the orders can be quite arbitrary. Most of these requests come in during six hours - Monday and Friday 2 pm to 5 pm. During those six hours, she will have 30 calls or visits with requests, a mean of 5 per hour. She can normally handle 12 requests in an hour but the measured standard deviation is .25 hours. We frequently get complaints from production that it feels like they have to wait forever just for someone to pick up the phone in purchasing. And I don’t want our department to be responsible for backing up work for a waiting customer.
1. What is the average time a Central Warehouse or Marketing person is in the system to get his/her request processed?
2. Robert is concerned that this is a costly process, taking into account that the purchasing person is paid $13 per hour and those making the requests $27 per hour. What is the average total cost per hour to process these requests?
3. Purchasing is working on a pre-request online form that they believe would allow them to process 18 request per hour. How much would this SAVE, assuming there is no cost for filling out the forms? It would SAVE per hour...