Each week, you will be asked to respond to the prompt or prompts in the discussion forum. Your initial post should be a minimum of 300 words in length, and is due on Sunday. By Tuesday, you should respond to two additional posts from your peers, 75-150 words minimum.
Waiting Line Models
Study the two cases in https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2016/04/predict-waiting-time-queuing-theory/ and comment on the importance of the waiting line theory then give another similar case study of the application of this theory for deeper understanding of the theory.
If you use any source outside of your own thoughts, you should reference that source. Include solid grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and spelling.
Robert Martinez
Hello again and yet I again I find myself struggling with the weekly assignments. I always seem to start out strong but somewhere along the process of solving the algebraic equations I end up making simple mistakes making the answers completely off. For example, this week alone I find myself spending an entire day in trying come up with the correct solution and when I realize the simple mistakes, I made makes me want to slap myself upside the head. Good thing I am stubborn or else I would have given up after the first week. It would be nice if Walmart would utilize these equations in order to come up with a minimum number of cashiers to meet customer demands. I always manage to get line whereby the customer either argues about the price, the scan bar is missing, or else they stumble through a bundle of coupons, trying to find the correct ones. Oh, and the ones that still write checks and then decide to balance their checkbooks while others are patiently (or impatiently) awaiting their turns. I try to just ignore the situation and mind my own business. Now my sister in the other hand did use similar calculations in determining the number of tellers to put on the line at her bank. She once told me that she held them to x number of minutes per customer and how many they could/should expect to serve. When doing my banking at her location I never had to wait for more than a minute or two to be served and all my needs met in a couple of minutes. Like Walmart, the Army has much to be desired when it comes to administrative personnel meeting timelines. We would have “taskers” placed upon us leaders that were expected to be met within a certain period. Afterwards it was the administrator’s job to compile all completed taskers and compile them into a report and submit for higher command. I don’t know as to how many times I had to answer for not meeting timelines when in fact we had. To prevent these situations occurring on a frequent basis I would sit down with my folks and lay out a timeline to get tasks completed by priority. The first hour of their day was devoted to getting all important soldiers needs accomplished, i.e. promotions and awards along with following up on previous submissions. The following hour was committed to getting all accomplished training compiled with scores followed by updating all soldier individual training folders. Now there were many more tasks that were organized for their daily schedules, but I feel you all get the idea. I gave them time constraints and goals to meet and would use this data when time came for scheduled ratings (NCOERs).
As for the scenarios presented to us, I will say that in trying to hold costs down by only having enough people to meet expected customer rates can be a setup for failure. Yes, utilizing more people will cost more but not having enough will end up costing so much more in terms of customer satisfaction and loyalty. If I experience poor service due to excessive waiting times, I will do everything within my powers to avoid giving them repeat business.
John Pfeffer
This theory is important because it allows you to figure out how many customer service representatives that you need in order to bring down your wait time to 30 seconds. If you did not have this theory you wouldn’t be able to figure out how many people you needed to hire in order to reach your goal. This is also the same for case 2 because you want to know how many tellers you will need to get your waiting time down to what it needs to be. This will help a company keep their customers happy and prevent them from spending too much money or hiring too many people.
Imagine if you had a call center that received phone calls about customer service for a product. You would want to know how many people to hire from the average number of calls so you could reduce the wait time that could save you money and create a happy customer. The average calls coming in would allow you to figure out how many employees you would need at any given time. This is the same with restaurants and customers coming in on the weekends. It is most likely going to be a larger number of people on the weekends than on weeknights so more people should be scheduled for those nights.
