MSG Team's other articles

11349 Sourcing Strategies and Procurement Processes

Not long ago, purchase function was seen to be a desk job, monotonous paper work, dull and passive and more of an administrative function. The purchase managements were the fall guys whose only aim was to keep feeding shop floor and avoiding stock out situation. Today the situation has changed totally. Procurement function is considered […]

9513 Handing off the Project to the Process Owner

After the control charts have been created and deployed, the control phase of the DMAIC methodology comes to a close as far as the project is concerned. The solution that the team had set out to reach has now been reached. It is therefore time to transition the process from being a project to being […]

9634 How Information Technology can Enable Governance in Developing Countries

The Problems of Governance in Developing Countries Governance is a problem in many Third World countries where the structures and the systems of governance are slow, archaic, and bureaucratic. Moreover, many developing countries do not have processes in place that would ensure reliable delivery of public services. For instance, take the example of the Asian […]

9936 Introduction to Information Technology (IT) Strategy

Introduction: What is IT Strategy and Why it is Important As the joke goes, A person who is sitting in front of a computer and not knowing what to do has been described as Intel Inside and Idiot Outside. Similarly, organizations that do not have an IT strategy in place are akin to clueless organizations […]

9806 Similarities and Differences in Implementation of Quality Frameworks in Manufacturing and Service Sector

Introduction A production defect in a company like GE (General Electric) might result in that specific product or the part being removed from the assembly line and not sent out as finished product. However, in the service sector, a process error might prove to be costly as in the case of the JPMC or Citigroup […]

Search with tags

  • No tags available.

Introduction

The waiting line or queue management is a critical part of service industry. It deals with issue of treatment of customers in sense reduce wait time and improvement of service.

Queue management deals with cases where the customer arrival is random; therefore, service rendered to them is also random.

A service organization can reduce cost and thus improve profitability by efficient queue management. A cost is associated with customer waiting in line and there is cost associated with adding new counters to reduce service time.

Queue management looks to address this trade off and offer solutions to management.

Waiting Line Problems

Waiting in line is common phenomena in daily life, for example, banks have customers in line to get service of teller, cars queue up for re-filling, workers line up to access machine to complete their job. Therefore, management needs to work on formulae, which will reduce wait time and create delighted customers without incurring an additional cost. Generally, queue management problems are trade off’s situation between cost of time spent in waiting v/s cost of additional capacity or machinery.

Finite and Infinite Population

In a waiting line scenario, there are cases of finite population of customers and infinite population of customers.

  • A finite population scenario considers a fixed or limited size of customers visiting the service counter. It also assumes that customer once served will leave the line thus reducing overall population of customers.

    However finite population model also considers a scenario where the customer after getting served will re-visit the service counter for re-service, leading to increase in finite population.

  • An infinite population theory looks at a scenario where subtractions and addition of customer do not impact overall workability of the model.

Queuing System

To solve problems related to queue management it is important to understand characteristics of the queue. Some common queue situations are waiting in line for service in super-market or banks, waiting for results from computer and waiting in line for bus or commuter rail.

General premise of queue theory is that there are limited resources for a given population of customers and addition of a new service line will increase the cost aspect to the business. A typical queue system has the following:

  1. Arrival Process: As the name suggests an arrival process look at different components of customer arrival. Customer arrival could in single, batch or bulk, arrival as distribution of time, arrival in finite population or infinite population.

  2. Service Mechanism: this looks at available resources for customer service, queue structure to avail the service and preemption of service. Underlining assumption here is that service time of customers is independent of arrival to the queue.

  3. Queue Characteristics: this looks at selection of customers from the queue for service. Generally, customer selection is through first come first served method, random or last in first out. As a result, customers leave if the queue is long, customer leave if they have waited too long or switch to faster serving queue.

Service Configuration

Another aspect of waiting line management is the service configuration. There are four types of service configuration, and they are as follows:

  • Single Channel, Single Phase (e.g. ship yards and car wash)
  • Single Channel, Multi Phase (e.g. bank tellers)
  • Multi Channel, Single Phase (e.g. separate queue of man and women for single ticket window)
  • Multi Channel, Multi Phase (e.g. Laundromat, where option of several washers and several dryers)

Article Written by

MSG Team

An insightful writer passionate about sharing expertise, trends, and tips, dedicated to inspiring and informing readers through engaging and thoughtful content.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Articles

Capacity Planning – Meaning, Classification and its Goals

MSG Team

What is Aggregate Planning? – Importance and its Strategies

MSG Team

Operational Transparency

MSG Team