[EFIMM0148 2022/2023] - Operations Management Seminar

Seminar 2: Process Design

A. Pre-seminar preparation
1. Read ‘The Action Response Application Processing Unit (ARAPU)’ (Slack et al.,
2022, p.211)
2. Prepare your answer for the activities.
B. Seminar activities

Activity 1: Solve this problem

1. A supermarket has 30 checkouts. There are currently 50 customers waiting to go

through the checkouts. Based on historical data, the supermarket manager knows that
it will take, on average, 10 minutes to process each customer. Using Little’s Law, how
long will it take to process all the current customers?
2. Over the lunch period, the supermarket is busier, with 70 customers waiting to go
through checkout. How long will it now take to process all the customers?
3. On this day, however, 3 checkout staff have called in sick. Recalculate the previous two
scenarios.
4. The supermarket’s head office has undertaken some research that has discovered that
they are losing customers because of lengthy waiting times at the checkouts. They
have decided that each customer should wait no longer than 10 minutes at the
checkout and have instructed the supermarket manager to invest in new checkouts on
this basis. Assuming the maximum number of customers queuing at any given time is
70, how many additional checkouts would the supermarket require?
Activity 2: Process of Making a Tea
Imagine that you have some guests visiting, using a set of process mapping symbols, draw a
process map of making a tea for them.
Activity 3: The Action Response Application Processing Unit (ARAPU) case study

1. What objectives should the ARAPU process be trying to achieve?

2. What is the main problem with the current ARAPU process?
3. How could the ARAPU process be improved?

References

SLACK, N., BRANDON-JONES, A. & BURGESS, N. 2022. Operations Management, Pearson Education,
Limited.