Design and Analysis of Diagnostic Service Centers
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Date: 09-16-2008
Start Time:
1:00pm
End Time: 2:00pm
Speaker: Alan Scheller Wolf, Tepper School of Business: Carnegie Mellon University
Location: 303 Mudd
ABSTRACT
This paper models customer service call centers, focusing on nurse-lines for health advice. The owner of the call center determines (i) the service depth, or length of time the nurses will spend advising the caller, and (ii) the staffing level (number of nurses) at the call center. Greater service depth (longer service times) result in more accurate diagnoses, increasing value to customers, but also increase customer wait times. Increased staffing (more nurses) reduce customer wait times, increasing value to customers, but also increase the owner's costs.
Customers balance their willingness to wait against the quality of advice they expect to receive, in making their decision as to whether to call the center or not. Thus the call center must determine where to make the staffing/service quality/wait time trade-off. We establish the structure of the relationship between service depth, staffing and utilization of the call center, as well as sensitivity results, within a strategic queueing framework.
BIO
Alan Scheller-Wolf teaches in the Operations Management area at Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University. As an undergraduate, he earned a B.S. in Mathematics and Computational Sciences and a B.A. in Art History from Stanford University. He did his doctoral studies in Operations Research at Columbia University, where he earned M.S., M.Phil., and a Ph.D. degrees. Between his undergraduate and graduate work he served as a mathematics instructor in Botswana, Africa with the United States Peace Corps.
Professor Scheller-Wolf's research focuses on stochastic processes, and how they can be used to estimate and improve the performance of computer, communication, manufacturing, and service systems. His earliest work, with Karl Sigman at Columbia, dealt with the performance of multi-server queueing systems - such as computer or telecommunication networks. He quantified the relationship between average customer delay, the number of servers operating, the traffic intensity and the variability of customer service times. Professor Scheller-Wolf has continued this work since he joined Tepper in 1996 most recently in collaboration with Mor Harchol-Balter in the Computer Science department at Carnegie Mellon and Rein Vesilo of Macquarie University in Australia.
Professor Scheller-Wolf is also actively pursuing research on problems dealing with inventory systems and supply chains. He is particularly interested in how systems operate when there are capacity constraints, alternate sourcing or delivery options, perishable inventory, or exchange rate factors present. With Professor's Sridhar Tayur and Uday Rao, Professor Scheller-Wolf helped design the supply chain for a new product introduction at Caterpillar, Inc. He has also completed consulting projects with the Greater Alleghenies Blood Services Division of the American Red Cross, on the possible relocation of their central blood processing facility, product line rationalizations with John Deere and Caterpillar, and the design of a real-time scheduling algorithm for in-game video advertisements for Massive Incorporated.