CASE STUDY: Waiting Lines (Queuing) For this assignment, you will analyze a case study and prepare a short executive report (plus appendices) that discusses the conditions of the case and your recommendations. THE CORANDO SPRING RESORT Donnie Byrd, manager of the Mexican-themed resort with over 340 rooms is trying to provide 5-star customer service. His position is contingent on having satisfied guests. Most recently, Donnie Byrd has been tasked with remodeling the front desk area to provide a quick, convenient, and customer-centric check-in experience by optimizing staffing levels and offering excellent guest service. Given the expanse of the resort and in order to ensure that guests rooms are ready with customers arrive, the resort policy is that check-in begins at 3pm. As a result, Mr. Byrd believes that the peak check-in time is between 3:00pm and 5:00pm. During this timeframe, an average of 36 guests arrive each hour. A front-desk clerk spends an average of 6 minutes to process a registration including providing room keys, a resort map, directions to the room, and answers to any additional questions. Mr. Byrd's goal is to improve guest services by reducing the length of time that guests spend waiting in line and checking-in. Below are the current proposals that Mr. Byrd is considering to manage the queuing process. PROPOSAL 1. Proposal 1 is the current layout where the resort has exactly four clerks on duty, each with a separate waiting line where customers choose one of the four lines and remain on that line until the clerk assigned to that line is available. PROPOSAL 2. Proposal 2 would designate one of the four front desk clerks as a quick-service line for returning guests registering with a corporate account. Approximately one-third of reservations fall into this category. Because these corporate guests are preregistered, the registration takes an average of just 4 minutes. Without these guests on the other three lines, the average time to register a non- corporate guest would increase to 6.5 minutes. Under this proposal, the non-corporate guests would choose any of the three separate lines. PROPOSAL 3. Proposal 3 is to re-configure the waiting area to have just one single-line system. All guests would wait on the same line and then be processed by whichever of the four front-desk clerks became available. (The only difference between proposal 1 and proposal 3 is the line formation) Note that this would require enough space in the lobby to accommodate what could be a significant queue. PROPOSAL 4. Proposal 4 is a variation on proposal 3. In this proposal, the servers will work in conjunction and work as a team so there will only be two check-in stations. There will still be a single line and guests will proceed to the next available check-in station (server). Since the clerks are working as a team, they not are able to process a registration in an average of 3 minutes. PROPOSAL 5. Proposal 5 uses a self-service kiosk. The time that a guest spends at the kiosk is comparable to the time it takes for a front-desk clerk to process the check-in; however, since check-ins are automated the service time would be a constant 5 minutes. Because some customers do have personal questions related to their check-in, Donnie estimates that approximately 25% of the guests, would use the self-service kiosk. Donnie hopes that this percent will increase in the future. For the remaining 75% of the guests, Donnie would have a single queue for customers who prefer traditional front-desk check-in clerks. This line would be serviced by three clerks working independently. Similar to the current proposal, each clerk can process a check-in in an average of 6 minutes per guest. PROPOSAL 6. Donnie is open to your suggestions. Please provide a suggestion for a "better" check-in system. Describe your proposal and be sure to compare your performance measures to the other proposals.