Waiting Lines

Waiting Lines

Introduction

Queuing theory is also known as the study of waiting lines. This is one of the most used as well as the eldest quantitative analysis techniques known to man (Render, Stair, & Hanna, 2012). Every day and everywhere we go people have to experience waiting lines, whether it’s at the bank making a deposit, students at school at lunch time, shopping at the grocery store, or even on the telephone waiting for the first customer service worker to answer to pay a bill. The amount of time a person waits in a line is contingent on a few things; how many items you have to buy, how many people are in front of you, in addition to the amount of customer service workers, or cashiers and how fast or well they can perform their jobs. There are three vital components of a queuing process, and they are when you arrive, the service facilities, and the waiting line (Render, Stair, & Hanna, 2012). The analytical models of waiting lines are comprised of these three components, they are a major factor that most companies use to evaluate the effectiveness of their service systems.
Walmart is just isn’t your everyday mom and pop grocery store; it has possibly everything that someone could want or need in their daily lives. Because Walmart does provide such a wide variety of things, their lines are usually pretty long. In fact, Walmart is known for having too many sales associates and not enough checkout lines open. Walmart, is well aware of this problem, they have even gone so far as to state that waiting in their long lines have caused many customers to leave, so many in fact that it began to and has hurt the organizations sales (Barbaro, 2007).
To gather insight about waiting lines there is a process of performance measurement that should be done. To be more specific there must be an average measured for the quantity of customers that are waiting in line, an average of the amount of time they spend in the line, in addition to the organization’s...

Similar Essays