Workload analysis and scheduling policies for a document processing centre

Abstract

This thesis is the result of a six-month internship at the Steel Stock Department of Keppel FELS Singapore, a company which is involved in the design and construction of oil-rigs. The primary objective of this project is to reduce the tardiness of the delivery of steel materials and identify the reasons behind the delay. The initial stage of this attachment is devoted to understanding the process flow of the department. Analysis has been done to pinpoint to the exact causes of the delay, which is at the stages of document processing and dispatching to the storage areas. The workload at each stage of document processing has been analyzed using a queuing model and it has been found that the stage that the issue vouchers have to be generated and printed out is the bottleneck in the entire process flow. Some recommendations have been proposed to alleviate the problem. The second part of this thesis focuses on the reasons why scheduling rules should be utilized when dispatching the issue vouchers to the storage areas. Three scheduling rules have been tested and their performances with regards to tardiness have been studied.