Improving campus dining operations using capacity and queue management: A simulation-based case study

Abstract

With growing consumer demand, dining facilities athigher education institutions have started to provide a wide assortment of food products catering to the needs of every individual. In developed countries like the United States, labor is an expensive asset, and campus dining facilities are struggling to utilize their employees efficiently and achieve service excellence. This research is motivated by a real-life case study of a campus dining service (CDS), which is an all-you-can-eat establishment with an annual influx of 500,000 students. The CDS has eight food stations but experiences long queues only at individual stations that prepare made-to-order (MTO) meals, thereby leading to excessive wait at the facility. Given the characteristics of the CDS, the objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of capacity reallocation and queue management on customer waiting time. The methodology integrates the six sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) framework with a discrete event simulation modeling approach to understand, analyze, and improve the service responsiveness at CDS. Five different alternatives pertaining to capacity reallocation and queue management are proposed. The experimental analyses indicate that reallocating underutilized workers to high demand MTO stations can reduce the average waiting time by 29%. Besides, when adopting a combination of server reallocation and queue management, the CDS can curtail wait times by up to 45%. Finally, the alternatives are evaluated with respect to multiple criteria (cost and ease of implementation, responsiveness, and sustainability) to provide managerial insights to the CDS.