By The idea of waiting lines first came up in the context of capacity design when we were doing a project for a major power utility. We worked with the customer who was trying to make sure they could have enough staff to run the business. He wanted to know if they could have at least one person at each line. After talking to the customer, I learned that he had some ideas and then made the decision that the customer should probably wait in line.
But the customer didn’t have to wait in line, he just needed to wait for the right person to come along.
One thing that will help to ensure the correct person is in front of you is to make sure that you’ve got enough capacity (the capacity of the line) to handle the expected number of people. A capacity design process is a process of identifying the number of people we expect to be on a line and finding out how many people are already there.
A capacity design process is, in short, designing a line so that it is able to handle all of the people who will be running through it. A process that allows the right number of people to be in front of you is called “capacity” and is what you should be getting out of design.
A capacity design process is used for everything from hospitals to cruise ships to apartment buildings. The process can also be used to help identify the number and type of customers in a product. For example, a food delivery service might have a capacity design process in place that can help them predict how many people they can handle at one time.
Capacity is often used in the construction industry when building new restaurants, hotels, or other service systems where the number of people in the restaurant or hotel is fixed through the design. Capacity is usually determined by the number of people expected to be in a given area at a given time. For example, a restaurant or hotel might have a capacity of 100 people per hour. If you expect to have 100 people in your restaurant at 1 pm and none are there, you can count on filling up the restaurant.
A lot of service systems that don’t have fixed capacity need to be designed to accommodate the waiting time. If you have 20 people in a restaurant, you want to be able to seat them up to 5 minutes after the restaurant closes, so that you can serve them at the moment they are leaving. A similar scenario is a waiting room where people are supposed to be checked in, but some of the staff are off-shift and the check-in system is slow.
I would not be surprised if you can find a couple of service systems that aren’t built to fill the time gap.
Yes, the wait time is a factor, but the real problem is capacity. Even if you just let someone run the wait time, you need to find some way to accommodate the capacity of the system.
