At a university, the office sorts out student applications and sends out acceptance/ rejection letters. The admissions team is colleagues A, B and C. 15% of the applications are international and the 85% are domestic.

B does the initial sorting and data verification. B reviews an application in 15 minutes if the application is complete. Tracking missing data takes an additional 10 minutes and 30% of all applications (domestic and international) have missing data that needs tracking down.

A complete application is ready for the next step: review of test results and grade sheets from other schools. A does this step and it takes 25 minutes per international application and 20 minutes for a domestic one. This is the only step where there is a difference in processing time between a domestic and international application.

A then passes the applications on to the next step that is performed by C. C spends 55 minutes per essay reading (international or domestic) and writes down her comments. The final review step = A and C discuss each application and decide whether to admit the student or not. This final step = 20 minutes per application.

Q: Explain the theoretical flow time for complete international applications (i.e, those that don’t require tracking down additional information)

Q: Explain what is the bottleneck and the capacity are of this process.

Q: X is hired to help C both in the essay reading and in the final review steps. The final review of a given application can now be performed by A and Cn or by A and X –still taking 20 minutes per application. How does this change the TFT from part (a) (i.e. for complete international applications)? What is now the capacity of the process?