SERVICE DESIGN ANALYTICS

Check-in counters at airports could be a nuisance because of the amount of time you have to wait in line before being served. Because of the variation in terms of how long it takes for a customer to check in and the number of baggage being checked in, there is considerable variation in terms of service time for a customer – the service time being the time it takes for the airline attendant to check the tickets, assign seats, ask required questions, process the check-in of baggage. With check-in for International flights, this also includes making sure the passports and visas are in order, and international check-in also typically entails more questions from customers. Given this situation, you have the following scenario –

For the average domestic flight, the service time for check-in is 12 minutes, while for an international flight it is 15 minutes. Passengers arrive at the counters in varying rates. Assume two cases here – i) about 3 hours before departure, customers arrive at the rate of one customer every 10 minutes, ii) about an hour before departure, the rate of arrival increases to one customer every 5 minutes. Assume the inter-arrival times follow an exponential distribution.

TO KEEP YOUR ANALYSIS SIMPLE, CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING FOUR SITUATIONS ONLY.

3 hrs before departure &

Domestic Check-In 1 hr before departure &

Domestic Check-In

3 hrs before departure &

International Check-In 1 hr before departure &

International Check-In

Also, assume that the above four cases are mutually independent and separate from one another i.e. there is no transition from one case to the others.

Determine the best operating system possible for the airline check-in operation. Your analysis should include the following –

a) Determination of the average number of customers in queue and the average waiting time for a customer in the queue before being serviced for check-in.

b) A consideration of the number of check-in counters that need to be open depending on the load on the system.

c) Possible different configurations with multiple counters 

d) Do you have one queue for all counters?

e) Do you have dedicated queue for each counter?

f) What else is being overlooked in the above scenario and your analysis?

g) How do you ensure that customers are not waiting in line too long before being checked-in?

h) How do you ensure that you don’t have too many counters open with no customers at these counters?