The labs that deal with Suspected Controlled Substances (SCS) in the Laboratories and Scientific Services (CBP-LSS) division of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) want a resource allocation plan to increase their labs’ efficiency. Specifically, they want to understand how many chemists they should assign to each of their labs in order to minimize the processing times of SCS. The purpose of the CBP-LSS Resource Allocation project is to simulate process flow at each LSS lab, then use the data collected from the simulation to define risk and recommend chemist assignments that will best reduce processing times. This presentation explains the particulars of fitting models to the simulation data, then using those models to create a VBA-based, user-friendly tool that can be used to suggest optimal chemist levels for a wide variety of parameters. The use of Excel in accomplishing both tasks will be highlighted, displaying two different possible scenarios in which to utilize Solver. The results of this project indicate that we can reduce overall system risk, as defined using our simulation data, by around 22% across CBP-LSS labs, simply by reassigning chemists.
