The Shalad Laundry and Dry Cleaning Shoppe has two clerks. Both of them handle both dry cleaning and laundry at the rate of 10 customers per hour. The arrival rate is 15 customers per hour.
The manager seeks to decrease the waiting cost of customer time by making the clerks specialists; i.e., one for laundry and one for dry cleaning.
If 2/3 of the customers come for dry cleaning and 1/3 for laundry, and if clerk specialization increases productively for either function to a capacity of 12 per hour, should such specialization be instituted? Assume that the customer waiting cost is five dollars per hour and that every customer is either a dry cleaning c stomer or a laundry customer, but not both. Assume that the system is Poisson-exponential.