A hospital orders surgical supplies using a fixed order interval system. Suppose that just prior to ordering, a check of rolls of gauze bandages shows that there are 40 currently on hand. Suppose also that these rolls have a daily usage that is approximately normal with a mean of 9 rolls and a standard deviation of 4 rolls. Lead time is 4 days and the desired service level is 98 percent. The order interval is 12 days.
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
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