California Children’s Hospital has been receiving numerouscustomer complaints because of its confusing, decentralizedappointment and registration process. When customers wantto make appointments or register child patients, they mustcontact the clinic or department they plan to visit. Severalproblems exist with this current strategy. Parents do not always know the most appropriate clinic or department theymust visit to address their children’s ailments. They therefore spend a significant amount of time on the phone beingtransferred from clinic to clinic until they reach the most appropriate clinic for their needs. The hospital also does notpublish the phone numbers of all clinic and departments,and parents must therefore invest a large amount of time indetective work to track down the correct phone number. Finally, the various clinics and departments do not communicate with each other. For example, when a doctor schedulesa referral with a colleague located in another department orclinic, that department or clinic almost never receives wordof the referral. The parent must contact the correct department or clinic and provide the needed referral information.In efforts to reengineer and improve its appointment andregistration process, the children’s hospital has decided tocentralize the process by establishing one call center devotedexclusively to appointments and registration. The hospital iscurrently in the middle of the planning stages for the callcenter. Lenny Davis, the hospital manager, plans to operatethe call center from 7 A.M. to 9 P.M. during the weekdays.Several months ago, the hospital hired an ambitiousmanagement consulting firm, Creative Chaos Consultants,to forecast the number of calls the call center would receiveeach hour of the day. Since all appointment and registrationrelated calls would be received by the call center, the consultants decided that they could forecast the calls at the callcenter by totaling the number of appointment and registration-related calls received by all clinics and departments.The team members visited all the clinics and departments,where they diligently recorded every call relating to appointments and registration. They then totaled these callsand altered the totals to account for calls missed during datacollection. They also altered totals to account for repeat callsthat occurred when the same parent called the hospital manytimes because of the confusion surrounding the decentralized process. Creative Chaos Consultants determined the average number of calls the call center should expect duringeach hour of a weekday. The following table provides theforecasts.