A community health system’s nurse team consists of 12 nurses…

A community health system’s nurse team consists of 12 nurses working in the local community. It takes a nurse 1.5 hours to complete one patient visit (including travel times and breaks). What is the capacity of the nurse team over the course of a 9-hour workday? Hint: the capacity = 1/processing time. What is the capacity of 1 nurse per hour? capacity per hour = 1 / processing time What is the capacity of 1 nurse per day? How many hours in a workday? capacity per day = capacity per hour * (how many hours per day). What is the capacity of 12 nurses? Capacity per day * 12 nurses.

A clinical trial accepts 2000 new patients each month. Half…

A clinical trial accepts 2000 new patients each month. Half of the patients are taking a placebo for 3 months. How many patients are taking the placebo on average at any given time? Hint: use Little’s Law: Inventory = Flow Rate * Flow time. Flow rate = number of patients per unit of time (month). How many patients each month? Note: among these patients, how many are taking the placebo? Flow time: how many months here?

Now, we want to see if we can design a process that operates…

Now, we want to see if we can design a process that operates with 5 employees instead of 7 (since there are 7 activities, some of the employees will perform more than 1 activity). We want to assign the activities in such a way that if an employee is in charge of more than one activity, these activities are adjacent (e.g., an employee can be assigned activities 1 and 2 but not 1 and 3). Moreover, realizing there might be setup costs involved with switching from one activity to another, we want to assign at most two activities to each employee.