Less waiting time can be a competitive advantage in many services. In this article, I try to summarize many ways to shorten the waiting time:
1- No waiting: Can we avoid waiting? If the customer will wait to submit an application, then can he submit it electronically or send it by mail? If the customer has to wait to ask a question, can we make these information available in printed material or through a web site?
2- Transfer waiting to the customer’s home: Instead of having a large convenient area for the waiting customers, we can move this waiting to the customer’s home. If the customer can get the service done through the Internet then he will wait to get the merchandise at home. This makes the customer happier and saves us a lot of space. In addition, this decreases the waiting time for the customer who wants to buy from the store.
3- Improve the process:
- minimize the sub-processes: study the different elements of the process and find those sub processes that can be done before the customer arrives or after he leaves.
- Minimize the time of the process: Industrial engineering and process re engineering can help us decrease teh time of the process. This includes time and motion study, simulation, motivation, training, layout improvement, more use of advanced communication technology.
- Quality improvement: bad quality means that we have to the work again which means waste of time and more waiting.
- Improve supply chain: a better supply chain can help us have what we needs in very short time.
- Decrease the variability: the less the variability the more we can control and forecast the waiting time.
- Forecasting techniques: forecasting helps us expect the number of customer at differnet time of the day and different times of the week and different weeks of the year. This helps us get prepared by buying goods or scheduling the shifts or hiring extra manpower.
4- Management of organization resources:
- Alliances: Alliances can help us get others do services on our behalf like the airlines alliances. This means we get extra capacity whenever needed.
- Employees rotation: Having the employees trained to do different jobs means that we can get extra number of them in one area whenever needed. This flexibility can be used to decrease the waiting time.
- Hiring part time employees
- Cancelling some services at certain busy times: We can have some services cancelled in certain busy days in order to focus on the peak demand of other services
- Inform the customer that his service was done: don’t ket the customer come and wait and then be told that his service is still not done. Let him know by phone or e-mail or a web site
- Decrease the tasks of the bottleneck: find the bottleneck and investigate all the possible ways to decrease the tasks assigned tot he bottleneck (a human-being or a machine)
5- Affecting customer arrival pattern:
- Offering incentives: Try to mak discount or any incentive fr the customers in the non busy times
- Having the seasonal goods on sale earlier than its season
- use appointment system
- Inform the customers about the busy times
