Queuing - A Necessary Evil?

We spend time waiting in line at post offices, at shops, at clinics, at banks, and at many other places that provide service. Much of this time spent is wasted because we are unable to do other useful things while queuing. Often it is a tiring and disagreeable activity - standing in line doing nothing!

Can we then do away with queuing? Unfortunately, no. Because unpleasant though it is, queuing in its most fundamental form brings forth the advantage of fairness to customers based on the order of their arrival. In other circumstances, queuing allows us to provide better service or achieve higher efficiency.

Queue Management

The problem of serving customers in a specific sequence at business or public establishments has been solved in many different ways. Depending on available resources and technology, various mechanical, electronic and computerized systems have been designed and implemented.

The first objective of any queue management system is to achieve a better quality of service to customers. In its most basic form, a queue management system will issue a queue ticket to an arriving customer and later call the ticket when service is available, eliminating the need to stand in line while waiting. In this way, queue management systems help to provide comfort as well as fairness to customers, by allowing them to maintain their position in the queue while they are seated comfortably or engaged in constructive activity.

Modern queue management systems attempt to do more than that. Through the use of computerized systems, they help the management by producing statistical reports on information such as arrival rates and patterns, waiting and service times, and default and reneging cases. Based on these statistics, the optimal use of resources can be achieved, helping the trade-off between service quality and service cost. The latest Internet-enabled systems allow remote system monitoring, report generation and system configuration across an Internet link.