Title: Optimising a help desk performance at a telecommunication company

Authors: Fawaz AbdulMalek, Ali Allahverdi

Addresses: Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, College of Engineering and Petroleum, Kuwait University, P.O. Box 5969, Safat, Kuwait. ' Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, College of Engineering and Petroleum, Kuwait University, P.O. Box 5969, Safat, Kuwait

Abstract: One of the problems faced by a mobile telecommunication company in Kuwait is the excessive waiting time to fix PC or software related problems of its over 800 employees. We successfully developed, validated and employed a simulation model to determine the number of technicians needed at the company to minimise total cost by considering both the cost of idle time of the employees and the wages of technicians. The simulation results indicated that the total cost can be reduced significantly by just hiring one more technician.

Keywords: discrete event simulation; mobile communications; telecommunications; Kuwait; performance optimisation; help desk performance; modelling; idle time; employee wages.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESMS.2009.027579

International Journal of Engineering Systems Modelling and Simulation, 2009 Vol.1 No.2/3, pp.160 - 164

Published online: 01 Aug 2009 *

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