Quantitative Analysis - Research Paper Example

It consists of three parts (Anderson, Sweeney, Williams, Camm, Cochran, Fry, and Ohlmann, 2010): Arrival or input to the system Waiting line The service facility An operations manager must make a trade of between the cost of providing good service and the cost of customer wait time or machine time. The most preferable arrangement for a manager would be that the queues are short enough that they do not annoy a customer. However, an operations manager would tolerate some waiting time if it leads to a significant savings in service costs.

An operations manager can evaluate a service facility by looking at the total expected cost. The total cost is the sum of expected service cost plus expected waiting cost. A service cost will increase as the firm tries to increase the level of its services. Managers can have standby personnel who can be assigned to a service station to short the length of the queue. Waiting cost is a reflection of the workers lost productivity and the cost of losing a customer as a result of poor service or long queue.

In some service systems this cost of waiting line can be intolerably high. The fundamental advantage of using a waiting line model is that it helps a manager to find out discrepancies in service systems and take measures to eradicate them. Thereby, making the service system efficient and customers satisfied. Example: MacDonald’s can make use of the knowledge from this theory. The service system of MacDonald’s consists of customer queues and billing counters. The floor manager needs to decide the number of billing counters it would keep open at a given time.

He needs to forecast the customer arrival rate at a given time and match it with the number of open billing counters. In this way he would ensure that optimal counters are functioning to service customers. The aim behind this initiative is to minimize service time and customer waiting time. Mathematical Example: Current waiting cost/service= (1/4 min waiting) ($60/min) =$15/service New System: ?= 8 customers/min arriving ?= 12 customers/min served Av waiting time in queue=Wq= ?/2? (?-?) =8/2(12) (12-8) =1/12min Waiting cost/trip= (1/12 min wait) ($60/min cost) =$5/trip Savings with more counters=$15(current system)-$5(new system) =$10/trip Cost of more counters=$3/trip Net Saving=$7/trip Constant Service-Time Model: Service systems having constant rather than exponential service time distribution are called Constant Service-Time Model.

When customers or equipment are processed according to a fixed cycle, constant service times are suitable. Since the constant rates are fixed, therefore the values of Lq, Wq, Ls and Ws would be always less than single channel model (Anderson et al., 2010). Simulation: Simulation is the attempt to duplicate the features, appearance and characteristics of a real system. This method helps a manager to define the operating characteristics of a system; thereby putting him in a better position to draw conclusions and make decisions based on the simulated models (Anderson et al., 2010). Benefits of Simulation: There are multiple reasons why this tool has become the most widely accepted tool by managers.

Amongst these reasons are following: The tool is flexible and easy to use. It can be used to analyze complex real world situations. Time compression, meaning that the effects of operations policies during a particular time period can be obtained in a short time.