Operations Management: Processes and Supply Chains, 12th Edition

Simulation with Excel Spreadsheets

The manual simulation of the drill process in Examples E.1 and E.2 demonstrates the basics of simulation. However, the simulation involves only one step in the process, two uncontrollable variables (weekly production requirements and the actual number of machine-hours available), and 20 time periods. It is important to simulate a process long enough to achieve steady state, so that the simulation is repeated over enough time that the average results for performance measures remain constant. Manual simulations can be excessively time-consuming, particularly if they include many subprocesses, many services or products with unique flow patterns, many uncontrollable variables, complex logic for releasing new jobs ...