United has asked you to help manage the acquisition of nasal swabs for their surveillance testing protocol this semester. All students (assume all 10,000 students participate) will be tested twice per week and all faculty/staff (assume 35,000 faculty/staff are required to participate) will be tested once per week. You have an unlimited ability to store nasal swabs, and the cost of storing a nasal swab for a year is one penny (1). Your nasal swab supplier has a 6 day lead time, and charges $50.00 for each delivery they make to you. Assume that the standard deviation of daily demand for nasal swabs is 1,000 swabs, and that due to the criticality of nasal swabs to the surveillance testing plan, you are told that you should plan to run out of swabs no more than 1% of the order cycles.

(a) What is the order quantity (Q) and reorder point (R) you will use to manage the acquisition of nasal swabs this semester?

(b) Upon implementing your policy, how frequently will you place an order for nasal swabs?

(c) What is the average inventory of nasal swabs you will maintain over the course of the semester?