A UPS employee, Davis, packs and labels three types of packages: basic packages, business packages, and oversized packages. Business packages take priority over basic packages and oversized packages because those customers paid a premium to have guaranteed two-day delivery. During his nine-hour shift, he has, on average, one container of packages containing a variety of basic, business, and oversized packages to process every 3 hours. As soon as Davis processes a package, he passes it to the next employee, who loads it onto a truck. The times it takes him to process the three different types of packages and the average number of packages per container are shown in the table below.
|
Basic |
Business |
Oversized |
| Average number of minutes to label and package each unit |
5 minutes |
4 minutes |
6 minutes |
| Average number of units per container |
10 |
10 |
5 |
Davis currently processes packages from each container as follows. First, he processes all business packages in the container. Then he randomly selects either basic packages or oversized packages for processing until the container is empty. However, his manager suggested to Davis that, for each container, he should process all the business packages first, second the basic packages, and last the oversized packages.
a. If Davis follows his supervisor's advice, what will happen to Davis's utilization?
b. What will happen to the average time that a package spends in the container?