A Queuing System

The Study Evaluates McDonald’s’ Queueing System

The study evaluates McDonald’s’ queueing system, which I frequently visit, and offers suggestions for how to make it better. Maurice and Richard McDonald started the American fast food and hamburger restaurant chain McDonald’s in 1940. The fast food restaurant is well-liked by both young people and adults who value good service and a pleasant setting. By providing perceived-to-be-cheap box meals during lunchtime, McDonald’s chains of restaurants increase their sales. Due to the popularity of the lunch menu, there may occasionally be long lines and uncomfortable waiting times.

Identification of Inefficiencies

Surprisingly, the station often attends in order, and it takes some time to handle the customer’s request. Therefore, the customers waiting to be served has to wait for the request of the customer in the front to be processed first. Additionally, idling may occur in such situations when the client is waiting for the station to complete the task associated with their order (Keith, & Gubellini, 2013). The quantity of time wasted can be measured using properties that take to account the total time taken in the restaurant, the number of people waiting in the queue, time spent waiting for the service, utilization of workstations, among others.

Potential Solutions for Improvement

The proportion of time spent in the queue is high if the restaurant could do things better and improve their system. I would conduct a customer survey to gauge customers’ satisfaction about length of the queue and waiting time. I would also list the stations and indicate their respective processing time in their line and the number of servers associated with the station. Additionally, I would apply the queuing theory which is based on the concept of position distribution. Also, with the help of an android application named Que, I would perform onsite queuing analysis and report performance indices. The application would be useful in improving customers’ service at McDonald’s restaurant by reducing queuing time and shortening the length of the line. Finally, I would propose the system to avoid complicated queuing systems since they make it hard for the customer to figure out where to go next thus to wasting more of their time.

References

Keith, L., & Gubellini, C. (2013). Restaurant Management System. New York: McGraw-Hill.