CHAPTER 18:

MANAGEMENT OF WAITING LINES

Prepared By:
MARASIGAN, Nessa Mae P.
SIMBULAN, John Carlo F.
 LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
 After completing this chapter you should be able to:
 Familiarized with the waiting line terminology
 Solve typical problems using models presented in
this chapter
 And answer these following questions:
 What imbalance does the existence of a waiting line reveal?
 What causes waiting lines to form and why is it possible to
eliminate them completely?
 What metrics are used to help managers analyze waiting lines?
 What are some psychological approaches to managing waiting
lines and why might a manager want to use them?
 What very important lesson does the constant service time model
provide for managers?
 What is
waiting?


>the action of staying where one is

or delaying action until a particular
time or until something else
happens.
 WAITING LINES
 Occurs when there is temporary imbalance between supply
(capacity) and demand
 Non-value added occurrences
 One of the seven waste in lean system
 Add to the cost of operation and reflect negatively on customer
service
 commonly found whenever customers arrived randomly for
service
 Waiting affects different
sectors…
 FOR CUSTOMERS
 can be acceptable (short waiting)
 can be annoying (long wait)
 can be a matter of life and death (emergencies)
 FOR BUSINESS
 cost of waiting comes from low productivity
 leads to competitive disadvantage
 FOR SOCIETY
 costs are wasted resources
 leads to reduced in quality of life
 TAKE NOTE THAT…
 Reducing waiting lines both benefit the
customers and the company
 From a managerial perspective, the key is to
determine the balance that will provide an
adequate level of service at a reasonable cost
 QUEUING THEORY
 mathematical approach to the analysis of
waiting lines
 directly applicable to a wide range of service
operations
 used for planning and analysis of service
capacity
 rely on the use of formulas and tables
 it is important to assess customer’s satisfaction
 How does queuing theory
starts?
 is based on studies about automatic dialing
equipment made in the early part of the 20th
century by Danish telephone engineer A.K.
Erlang
 after World War II, few attempts were made to
apply queuing theory to business problem
 Why is there
waiting? Or why
do we need to
wait?

The key word is average.

In reality, customers arrive at
random intervals rather than at
evenly spaced intervals and some
orders take longer to fill than others.
And because services cannot be
performed ahead of time and stored
until it is needed.
> the system becomes
temporarily overloaded, giving the
rise of waiting lines.
 MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS OF
WAITING LINES
1. cost to provide waiting space
2. possible loss of business: should customers
leave the line before being served or refuse to
wait at all
3. possible loss of goodwill
4. possible reduction in customer’s satisfaction
5. resulting congestion that may disrupt other
business operations or customers
 GOAL OF WAITING LINE
MANAGEMENT
 minimize the sum of two costs; customer
waiting cost and service capacity cost
Capacity Cost
> are the costs of maintaining the ability to provide service
Customer Waiting Cost
> includes salaries paid to employees while they wait for the
service, cost of the space for waiting and any loss of business due
to customers refusing to wait and possibly going to others in the
future
Total Cost
> sum of capacity cost and customer waiting cost
Figure 1

 as the capacity increases, its

cost increases (upward slope)

 as capacity increases, the

number of customers waiting and
the time they wait tend to
decrease, thus decreasing waiting
cost (downward slope)

 total cost can be represented as

a u-shape curve
 HOW SOME ORAGANIZATIONS
DEAL WITH WAITING LINES?
The existence of waiting lines can reflect
negatively on an organization’s quality image.

 some organizations are focusing their attention

on providing faster service- speeding up the
rate at which service is delivered rather than
increasing the number of servers.
 QUEUING SYSTEM
 customers enter a waiting line of a service
facility, receive service when their turn comes,
and then leave the system.
CHARACTERISTICS OF WAITING
LINES
1. POPULATION SOURCE
 Approach to use in analyzing a queuing problem
depends on whether the potential number of
customers is limited.
Infinite source situation- customer arrivals are

unrestricted
 Finite source situation- the number of potential customers
is limited
2. NUMBER OF SERVERS (CHANNELS)
 Channel- a server in a service system
 Single Channel System- a group of servers working
together as a team
 Multiple Channel System- more than one server
FOUR COMMON VARIATIONS OF
QUEUING SYSTEMS
 CHARACTERISTICS OF WAITING
LINES

3. ARRIVAL AND SERVICE PATTERNS

 waiting lines are a direct result of arrival and service
variability; random highly variable arrival and service
patterns cause systems to be temporarily overload.

 the variability can be described by theoretical distribution

 Poisson Distribution- often provides a reasonably good
description of customer arrivals per unit of time
 Negative Exponential Distribution- often provides a
reasonably good description of customer service times
 POISSON ARRIVALS AND
EXPONENTIAL SERVICE TIMES
Research has shown that these assumptions are often
appropriate for customer arrivals but less likely to be
appropriate for service.

 In these situations where the assumptions are not reasonably satisfied,

the alternatives would be to:
1. to develop a more suitable model
2. search for a better and usually more complex existing model
3. or to resort to computer simulation

OTHER POSSIBILITIES CUSTOMERS CAN DO:

4. waiting customers grow impatient and leave the line (reneging)
5. customers switch to another line (jockeying)
6. upon arriving, customers decide the line is too long and
therefore, do not enter the line (balking)
CHARACTERISTICS OF WAITING
LINES
4. QUEUE DISCIPLINE

 the order in which customers are

processed.

 first come first served basis- most

commonly encountered rule
 MEASURES OF WAITING LINE
PERFORMANCE
1. the average number of customers waiting, either in
line or in the system
2. the average time customers wait, either in line or in
the system
3. system utilization, which refers to the percentage of
capacity utilized
4. the implied cost of a given level of capacity and its
related waiting line
5. the probability that an arrival will have to wait for
service
 QUEUING MODELS: INIFINITE
SOURCE
 the models pertain to a system operating under steady state
conditions; that they assume the average arrival and service rates
are stable.


FOUR MODELS DESCRIBED ARE:
1. Single server, exponential service time
2. Single server, constant service time
3. Multiple server, exponential service time
4. Multiple priority service, exponential service time
 SYSTEM UTILIZATION
 degree to which any part of the service system
is occupied by an arrival

 ratio of demand (as measured by the arrival

rate) to supply or capacity(measured by the
product of the number of servers)
 SINGLE SERVER, EXPONENTIAL
SERVICE TIME
 the simplest model involves a system that has
one server or a single crew.
 the queue discipline is first come first served
basis
 SINGLE SERVER, CONSTANT
SERVICE TIME
 a case in point is a system with constant
service time
 a system can reduce or eliminate the
variability of either or both, it can shorten
waiting lines noticeably.
 MULTIPLE SERVER, EXPONENTIAL
SERVICE TIME
 exists whenever two or more servers are working
independently to provide service to customer arrivals.
 use of model involves the following assumptions:
1. a poisson arrival rate and exponential service time
2. servers all work at the same average rate
3. customers form a single waiting line
 MULTIPLE PRIORITIES
 customers are processed according to some measure of
importance
 useful for describing customer waiting time
 arriving customers are assigned to one of several priority classes
or categories according to predetermined assignment method
 Customers are then processed by class, highest class first. Within
each class, processing is first come first served basis
 REVISING PRIORITIES

 if any of the waiting time computed is deemed

too long, there are two options:

1. is to increase the number of servers

2. attempt to increase the service rate, say by
introducing new methods
 COST ANALYSIS
 the design of a service system often reflects the
desire of management to balance the cost of
capacity with the expected cost of customers
waiting in the system.
 computing system costs- simplest approach to
a cost analysis
 Computing the costs for customers in the system and
total capacity cost
 Capacity cost typically is a function of the number of
servers
 MAXIMUM LINE LENGTH
 amount of space to allocate for waiting lines

 with an infinite population source, the waiting

line can become infinitely long.

 This implies that no matter how much space is allocated for

waiting line, one can never be completely sure that the space
requirements won’t exceed that amount.
QUEING MODEL: FINITE SOURCE
 is appropriate for cases in which the calling population is
limited to a relatively small number of potential calls
 arrival rates are required to be Poisson and service times
exponential
 CONSTRAINT
MANAGEMENT
 use temporary workers
 using temporary or part time workers during busy
periods may be possible
 shift demand
 variable pricing strategies can be effective in smoothing
demand more evenly on the system
 standardized the service
 more service can be standardized, the greater the impact
on waiting line
 look for a bottleneck
 One aspect of process may be largely responsible for a
slow service rate
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAITING
 steps can be taken in certain situations that make the
situation more acceptable to those whose in waiting line.

 if those waiting in line have nothing

else to occupy their thoughts, they
often tend to focus on the fact that they
are waiting in line and they usually
perceive the waiting time to be longer
than the actual waiting time.

 if something else occupies them

while they wait, their perception of
waiting time is often less than their
actual waiting time.
 OPERATIONS STRATEGY
1. consider the possibility of reducing
variability in processing times by increasing
the degree of standardization of the service
being provided.

2. effort to shift some arrivals to “off times” by

using reservation system, early bird specials,
senior discounts and etc.
 KEY POINTS
1. waiting line occurs when there is an
imbalance between supply and demand in
service system
2. one cause of imbalances is variability in
service times and or customer arrival times
3. two important approaches to managing lines
are reducing variability where possible by
standardizing a process and altering the
perceived waiting time.