Posted: November 26th, 2014

What are the general trade-offs that are involved in waiting line decisions? Who needs to be involved in assessing the cost of customers waiting for service? How has technology had an impact on analyzing waiting line systems? Visit a restaurant and formulate your answers accordingly. Please site any sources you use.

Waiting lines;

What are the general trade-offs that are involved in waiting line decisions? Who needs to be involved in assessing the cost of customers waiting for service? How has technology had an impact on analyzing waiting line systems? Visit a restaurant and formulate your answers accordingly. Please site any sources you use.

Explanation :

This week we are learning about the management of waiting lines and the managerial implications of waiting lines.  Waiting occurs when companies do not provide adequate space or capacity to service customers.  We will look at the goals of waiting line management, the characteristics of waiting lines, measures of waiting-line performance and the various steady state queuing models used to evaluate waiting lines.  Operation manager assess waiting lines through queuing theory, which is a mathematical approach to the analysis of waiting lines applicable to many environments (Stevenson, 2012).  This can apply to any businesses including call centers, banks, post offices, restaurants, or governmental services.  When customers have excessive waiting lines, the business may be concerned of the cost to provide waiting space, a possible loss of business when customers leave the line before being served or refuse to wait at all, and a possible loss of goodwill.  Ultimately long waits usually result in a reduction of customer satisfaction (Stevenson, 2012).  Managers typically consider five measures when evaluating waiting line performance:

•The average number of customers waiting (in line or in the system)
•The average time customers wait (in line or in the system)
•System utilization
•The implied cost of a given level of capacity and its related waiting line
•The probability that an arrival will have to wait for service
•Resulting congestion may disrupt other business operations and/or customers (Stevenson, 2012).

Companies can use analytical techniques such as Little’s Laws for queuing systems to assess trade-offs that are involved in waiting line decisions.  Little’s Law says the average number of items in a system is the product of the average flow rate into the system and average length of time an item spends in the system (Fralix & Riano, 2010).  For example, Little’s Law can be used to calculate the inventory that will accumulate in a system or the number of people that will be waiting in line for a given flow rate and throughput time.  It can also be used to calculate the flow rate or throughput time when the other two variables are known.

In this week’s discussion we will look at the general trade-offs that are involved in waiting line decisions, who needs to be involved in assessing the cost of customers waiting for service, and how technology has had an impact on analyzing waiting line systems.  I look forward to your insight this week.

References:

Fralix, B. H., & Riano, G. (2010). A new look at transient versions of Little’s law, and M/G/1 preemptive last-come-first-served queues. Journal of Applied Probability, 47(2), 459-473.

Stevenson, W. (2012). Operations management (11th ed.).  McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

PLACE THIS ORDER OR A SIMILAR ORDER WITH US TODAY AND GET AN AMAZING DISCOUNT 🙂