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TOPIC 6 SUB-TOPIC(s)
Learning Outcome)
Service Introduction CLO1
Operations Scheduling Challenges in Services Apply the theories
Planning and Work Shift and concepts of
Scheduling Scheduling Customer-as-Participant Services production and
Working Lines operations
management

Why This Lesson?

In this lesson, students will understand how service planning and scheduling is used in most business practices
in order to serve the customers.

Whether in retail or a large firm, operations planning, and scheduling can benefit both the managers and
customers. It will be discussed in detail in the further sections.

Introduction

Services are operations with several factors that need to be considered. Those factors are how close they are
in contact with the customers and the intangible outputs that could not be stored in their facility. It determines
the quality of the products from the high labor costs to the capital costs.

In the service business, there is an enormous amount of diversity in the workforce. From the types of products
sold, the people that worked in the business, and the popularity of the products that branched out. The
service businesses can be of any size from a small store to a large outlet in a shopping mall. The majority of
businesses have technical training for their staff due to the significant dependence on computers and
technology.

In order for the business to stay competitive, managers need to plan and control their firms.

Scheduling Challenges in Services

In most cases, planning and controlling daily activities can be difficult due to the following reasons. They are
the services produced and delivered by people, and a non-uniform pattern of demand.

Non-uniform demand is associated with businesses that could not store certain services during a high-demand
period. The tactics used by most businesses can be through preemptive actions and a more flexible
operation. Preemptive actions are to make the demand more uniform through a fixed schedule that
customers must abide by while a flexible operation can accommodate various capacities such as a
marketing firm engaging in a copywriter to copywrite documents and perform the content.

Other tactics used would be to anticipate the demands during each time period so that they could assign
their employees on a certain schedule. It is important to form a waiting line at certain places if the customers
want to receive the goods in an orderly manner.

For the services produced, some businesses use either a product-focused or a process-focused operation.
The customer’s demand is forecasted and the decisions for the capacity are made. It includes high volumes
of standardised products and management that focuses on controlling production costs and the delivery of
goods.

Process-focused operations refer to management. To balance the capacity between the operations, it is
important to control both the input and output. In most firms, Gantt charts are used to coordinate the flow
between departments while a sequence is implemented for changes to occur.

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 Work Shift

For most people, a work shift is the time period during which they are at work, whether in a building or at
home. In most work shifts, there are three difficulties that occur such as demand variability, service time
variability, and availability of personnel.

This is due to the unpredictable changes in the market where the customer’s preference affects the demand
for the product to be produced. To counter this problem, managers implement two tactics. They are using
full-time exclusively and some of the full-time employees as a base and fill in the peak demand with part-time
employees.

There is a procedure that is used in the work shift called the heuristic procedure. It is used to solve a number
of tasks.

Scheduling Customer-as-Participant Services

For this section, the firms must provide customers ease when using features in their facilities such as walkways,
directions and signs to assist them. It is important because the customers must feel welcomed into the facility
if they are going to purchase the products.

Some of the facility’s layouts must focus on advertising their products through attractive displays of their
merchandise. This is commonly seen in most clothing brand shops where the latest designer clothes are
displayed on mannequins. In most retailers, employees must perform at their best to satisfy the customers’
demands. In order to level the demand, waiting lines are formed to ensure that the customers are arranged
in an orderly manner if they want to receive the goods with their cooperation.

Working Lines

For most business practices, working lines are formed because the demand patterns from the customers are
either irregular or random. Different outlets have varied service times among the customers.

To solve this, managers try to find a balance to utilise resources and keeping the customers satisfied. Examples
of waiting lines could be drivers waiting at an RFID toll to pay, queuing up at a kebab stall in a food court to
buy a kebab sandwich, or passengers waiting inside the MAS airlines for the plane to take off.

In waiting lines, they are calculated by queuing theory. Queuing theory is a mathematical approach to
analyse waiting lines. The goal is to minimise the sum of two costs, which are the customer waiting costs and
the service capacity costs. There are no non-value-added occurrences in this calculation.

The implications of waiting lines are to provide waiting space from cost. It could be a negative view for
customers since the majority refused to wait and will immediately walk out of the establishment. Besides that,
the business may have a loss of goodwill with how much the waiting line could reduce customer satisfaction.
This form of congestion can disrupt other operations with how long the customers have to wait just to receive
their purchased goods in the end.

The graph below shows how the queuing analysis is measured:

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In the analysis, managers are able to determine how long will the customers have to wait and calculate the
average number and time. By the end of the calculation, the percentage of time will be presented.

Some terminologies that most students remember are queues refer to a waiting line while channels are a
number of waiting lines in the queue system. The service phase refers to the number of steps in a process,
arrival rate is when the person or thing arrives while the service rate is the rate is serviced.

They are measured through arrivals per unit of time. It is important to know that queue discipline is the rule
that determines the order in which the arrivals are serviced while the queue length is the number of arrivals
waiting for service. The time in the system is the arrival’s waiting and service time. Finally, utilisation is the
degree to which any part of the service system is occupied by an arrival.

Sometimes, the measurement uses a Poisson distribution. It is used for a number of events in other specified
intervals such as distance, area or volume. It is basically used to estimate the probability of a given number
of events occurring at a fixed time.

There are various symbols used to define the queuing system variables seen below:

• l = average arrival rate

• 1/l = average time between arrivals
• µ = average service rate for each server
• 1/µ = average service time
• n1 = average number of arrivals waiting
• nS = average number of arrivals in the system
• t1 = average time arrivals wait
• tS = average time arrivals are in the system
• Pn = probability of exactly n arrivals in the system

There are different types of queuing models used by most businesses. The first model has a single channel,
single phase, both Poisson arrival and service rate distribution and an unlimited maximum queue length such
as a single booth that sells tickets. The second model has all the similarities to the first model, but it includes a
constant service rate, which could be applied to automated machines lthe vending machine. The third
model is also similar, but it has a limited maximum queue length, which means that customers do not have to
wait long to obtain their products such as receiving a burger from a McDonalds’ drive-through. Finally, the
fourth model has multiple channels for customers to choose from to avoid a long queue wait such as the
multiple booths on the highway for drivers to pay the toll such as Touch n Go, SmartTag or RFID.

- end of lesson content –

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