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Activities may take time to process a transaction. Time costs money. You can measure and define the length of time (duration) that each activity takes to process a transaction, and assign costs to activities and the resources used at the activities in an iGrafx process model.
Activities may need resources to process transactions. A resource is a person, machine, or other asset used to process a transaction. When multiple transactions are processed, activities can contend for resources.
In your model, you can define what a resource represents and which resources are used by which activities in the model. For each type of resource in your model, you can define the quantity of the resource available, the resource behavior, and resource schedule.
Resources are managed and defined as individual resources, pools, or unlimited resources organized under resource types.
In a simulation, duration is usually measured as the time required for a transaction to move through a process. These measurements, referred to as cycle time, typically include the time required for each activity to process a transaction, and the time a transaction spends waiting in a queue to enter an activity or waiting for a necessary resource to become available.
iGrafx can simulate a process to determine a range of cycle times. To improve cycle time, you can make changes to your model and simulate again to determine the impact of your changes.
You can measure process or transaction cost in an iGrafx process model by assigning costs to activities and resources. Activity cost is usually a fixed cost while resource cost can be fixed, per hour, per use, or a combination of the three. During a simulation, costs are accumulated and reported by transaction, by activity or group of activities (swimlane/process/overall), and by resource.
Time and cost are closely related, and you may decide to trade one for the other. For example, you could add resources to reduce processing time, but this may have the effect of increasing processing cost. On the other hand, you could reduce resources to lower costs, but this may increase processing time. With iGrafx, you can easily model these tradeoffs and determine their impacts.
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