3. An office of the state employment service in a city is responsible for interviewing persons seeking employment, placing the applicants’ qualifications in a file, and searching a file of job openings to determine if a suitable match between job and applicant can be found. The three persons presently employed in this activity enjoy interviewing clients more than they enjoy searching files. Employees are displeased because they are overloaded with work, have shortened their breaks, and work some unwanted overtime.

During the typical 8-hour day, clients arrive with an average interarrival time of 8 minutes. The times required to perform the interviews are normally distributed with a mean of 30 minutes and a standard deviation of 5 minutes. Searching the list of job openings requires approximately 7 minutes for each applicant to review files that are in a room next to the interview rooms. No more than three persons can use the files at the same time.

The office manager is planning to add the necessary personnel. She also is considering how to assign work to individuals. All the employees could continue to interview applicants and perform the associated file searches. Or one or more employees could be permanently assigned to interview applicants, and one or more could be assigned permanently to search files. As a third alternative, the jobs could be rotated each hour, half day, day, week, or month.

a. How many employees should be assigned to the office to perform the average work load without overtime? Employees are paid for 8 hours but are permitted a 15-

minute break in the morning and in the afternoon.

b. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the alternative ways that work can be assigned to structure jobs in this office.