Question

An insurance company receives three types of policy application bundles daily from its head office for data entry and tiling. The time (in minutes) required for each type for these two operations is given in the following table:

Policy	1	2	3
Data Entry	90	120	180
Filing	140	110	100

Find the sequence that minimizes the total time required to complete the entire task.

Answer 1

Policy	1	2	3
Data Entry	90	120	180
Filing	140	110	100

Observe that Min (Data entry, filing) = 90, corresponds to policy 1 on data entry
∴ Policy 1 is placed first in sequence.

1

Then the problem reduces to

Policy	2	3
Data Entry	120	180
Filing	110	100

Now, Min (Data entry, filing) = 100, corresponds to policy 3 on filing.
∴ Policy 3 is placed last on sequence and policy 2 on remaining.
∴ Optimal sequence is

1

2

3

Total elapsed time

Policy	Data entry		Filling
	In	Out	In	Out
1 (90, 140)	0	90	90	230
2 (120, 110)	90	210	230	340
3 (180, 100)	210	390	390	490

∴ Total elapsed time = 490 mins
Idle time for data entry = 490 – 390 = 100 mins
Idle time for filling = 90 + 50 = 140 mins.