Analysis of Business Operations of Hometown Auto & Ag Using SIMPROCESS

Abstract

The flow of vehicles through an auto parts and repair business, Hometown Auto & Ag, was modeled using SIMPROCESS software. 100 replications of a week of business were used to analyze the amount of time customers waited for a mechanic to begin repair on their vehicles. These results were used to provide insight on whether or not the addition of another mechanic would significantly improve these waiting times. This model showed that the addition of another mechanic would reduce waiting times for resources and would most likely be beneficial to the business, especially if business was likely to increase. The sensitivity of the results to certain parts of the model, like the percentages representing the probability of the occurrence of certain types of repairs and the distributions used to represent repair times, was also analyzed. The results were particularly sensitive to both the percentages and distributions. This indicated a need for further study of the frequency of the types of repairs and the nature of the probability distributions that would most accurately portray repair times.