ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the notion of stocks and flows in the context of business processes. Typical jobs consist of customers, orders, bills, or information. Resources perform the transformation activities. A job follows a certain routing within a process, determining the temporal order in which activities are executed. Routing provides information about the activities to be performed, their sequence, the resources needed, and the time standards. Speedy Tax Services offers low-cost tax-preparation services in many locations throughout New England. Process stability, however, is defined in terms of an infinite time horizon. The accumulation of orders in some situations might increase the time that customers wait for a product because it might increase the amount of time the order spends in the process. A trend in manufacturing has been to reduce the batch sizes in order to become more responsive to a market where customers expect shorter waiting times.
