HyTex is a software company that offers technical support for its customers over the phone. The demand for help is fairly constant throughout the day, with calls arriving at a rate of approximately 10...

HyTex is a software company that offers technical support for its customers over the phone. The demand for help is fairly constant throughout the day, with calls arriving at a rate of approximately 10 per minute. HyTex keeps 35 technical support lines open at all times, and it takes 3.5 minutes, on average, to answer a customer’s question. Customers who call when all technical support people are busy face two possible situations. If there are fewer than 20 customers already on hold (the phone version of waiting in line), then a new caller is also put on hold. But if 20 customers are already on hold, a new caller gets a busy signal and must hang up. The service times—the times to answer customers’ questions—are highly variable. HyTex wants to know how much it is suffering because of this variability.

Objective To use simulation to analyze the affect of the shape of the service time distribution on customer waiting times.