Pantry Shopper - a Supermarket in Philadelphia
Essay by ThinkandDogood • June 22, 2016 • Case Study • 580 Words (3 Pages) • 4,028 Views
Case Background
Pantry Shopper is a supermarket in Philadelphia, which facing cruel market competition .The management feels shoppers will choose one supermarket over another due to the services offered. The new manager “Beth Smith-Danton” has idea by providing shoppers with faster, more efficient service to increase customer satisfaction and improve market share.
In order to achieve business goals, Beth has moved check approval from the main desk to the cash register, increased the limit on cash back and instituted a delivery service to make shopping more convenient. However, she has not changed the checkout system. The last remodeling of the checkout system occurred in 1982.
Beth would like to use her square footage efficiently by design the system for peak usage and after observed customer in check out process. She noticed that customers arrived at the checkout at a rate of approximately 100 per hour. Fully 20 percent of the customers had 10 items or less. Those people took about 2 minutes to serve on average, while customers with more than 10 items took about 4 minutes to process. Beth expects service time to improve when universal price code readers are installed in the new design
In order to reduce the service time, Beth decided to split the cash registers into two groups: for customers with less than or equal 10 items, and for customers with more than 10 items.
Customer | No. of items in cart |
Type 1 | less than or equal 10 items |
Type 2 | more than 10 items |
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Case Solution: Queuing
- Cash registers for customers with less than or equal to 10 items
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(On average)[pic 9]
For an existing system, the store already has 1 cash register which has queuing characteristic as listed below:
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Since Beth concerns about the space utilization, she decides to set the probability of no customers in system (P0) at 50% to make sure that there is balance between the service rate and the space.
She decides to add 1 more cash register, so the model used in this scenario is M/M/2 (See in figure 1).
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(on average)[pic 15]
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So she meets the target of P0 for customer with less than or equal to 10 items by adding 1 additional cash registers with shorter average time waiting in line and less average number of customers waiting in line.
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