Question: The Delly temporary service agency trains people to do secretarial (word processing) work. If a firm needs someone for a short period of time (a few days to a few weeks) then that firm hires the temporary employee through Delly.

Delly loses employees to the companies that hire its temporaries and it must continually hire and train new ones. The training division at Delly hires and trains people in a group. The training class costs about $13000 (this cost does not vary with the size of the class). The training takes 2 weeks. Delly pays the wages of these people while they are in training. Once training is completed these people are still paid by the training division until the employment division needs them. Delly pays $600/week per employee. The employment division takes the trained employees at the fairly steady rate of about 6 employees every week and assumes their costs from then on.

a) What problem type or model (e.g., queuing, new-vendor, etc.) is appropriate to decide how many to hire and train at once.

b) Give the names of the parameters of this model and describe them in the words of this problem.

c) What is the optimal size of the group to be trained? Round your answer to the nearest integer.