Purchasing requests arrive to an agent at a rate of seven per day. The time between arrivals is a Poisson distribution. The agent typically requires 1 h to process a request. The processing time is exponentially distributed. Assuming 8 h working days (Hint: is it a M/M/1 system?)
1) What is the cycle time (the average time that a request spends in the process)?
2) What is the WIP inventory (the average number of requests in the process)?
3) How often is the WIP entirely replaced with a new set of requests?