Analysis of the Sales Checkout Operation in Supermarket Using Queuing Theory

Priyangika J.S.K.C,Cooray T.M.J.A

doi:10.13189/ujm.2016.040703

Abstract

Waiting lines or queues are a common phenomenon in life, especially in the province of organizations that are for profit making. Queues are common in such places as petrol or filling stations, supermarkets stores, clinics, hospitals, motor parks, manufacturing firms, to mention a but a few. An interesting aspect of queuing process resides in the measures of its system's performance, especially in terms of average service rate, systems, utilization and the costs implied for a given capacity level. This paper explains the analysis of Queuing systems for the empirical data of supermarket checkout service unit using queuing theory. One of the expected gains from studying queuing systems is to review the efficiency of the models in terms of utilization and waiting length, hence increasing the number of queues so customers will not have to wait longer when servers are too busy. In other words, trying to estimate the waiting time and length of queue(s), is the aim of this study. Queuing simulation is used to obtain a sample performance result and estimated solutions for multiple queuing models are also interested. This study requires an empirical data which may include the variables like, arrival time in the queue of checkout operating unit (server), departure time, service time, etc. A questionnaire is developed to collect the data for such variables and the reaction of the Supermarket from the customers separately. This model is developed for a sales checkout operation in the supermarket. The model designed for this research is multiple queues multiple-server model. The model contains five servers which are checkout sales counters; attached to each server is a queue. In any service system, a queue forms whenever current demand exceeds the existing capacity to serve. This occurs when the checkout operation unit is too busy to serve the arriving costumers, immediately.

Highlights

Delays and queuing problems are most common features in our daily-life situations such as at a bank or postal office, at a ticketing office, in public transportation or in a traffic jam and in more technical environments, such as in manufacturing, computer networking and telecommunications
The main purpose of this paper is to review the application of queuing theory and to evaluate the parameters involved in the service unit for the sales checkout operation in the Supermarket
Customers are served on a first-come, first-served (FIFO) basis as a salesman of checkout operation unit becomes free

Summary

Introduction

Delays and queuing problems are most common features in our daily-life situations such as at a bank or postal office, at a ticketing office, in public transportation or in a traffic jam and in more technical environments, such as in manufacturing, computer networking and telecommunications. They play an essential role for business process re-engineering purposes in administrative tasks. Whenever customers arrive at a service facility, some of them have to wait before they receive the desired service. Customers arrive at a service facility with several queues, each with one server (sales checkout counter). The customers choose a queue of a server according to some mechanism (e.g., shortest queue or shortest workload). (Adan, 2000)

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