Queue management

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 (Cagle, 2011). 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 the cost of time spent in waiting v/s cost of additional capacity or machinery (Cagle, 2011).

The waiting line or queue management is a critical part of the service industry (Cagle, 2011). It deals with the issue of treatment of customers in sense reduce waiting time and improvement of service. Queue management deals with cases where the customer arrival is random; therefore, service rendered to them is also random (Cagle, 2011). A service organization can reduce costs and thus improve profitability by efficient queue management (Cagle, 2011). A cost is associated with the 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 (Cagle, 2011).

Proper handling for the waiting lines is crucial for business success. Analyzing the cost-profit resulted from available alternatives is playing essential part in the desirable success. Many technical solutions were developed during decades for how service providers can improve their service delivery time. Restaurants, and others service providers’ companies, need to ensure proper handling of queuing time to maximize their profit generation and reduce associated tangible and intangible loses from undesirable long waiting lines.

References

Cagle, C. J. (2011). Capacity position and financial performance: longitudinal evidence from U.S. manufacturers. The University of Texas at Arlington.

Investopedia web site. (n.d.). “Queuing Theory”. Retrieved from: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/queuing-theory.asp

Sztrik, J. (2012). “Basic Queueing Theory”. Retrieved from: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/848f/a1f48ad9d3edb24b05667f15cfc633eb8f69.pdf