My queue turned out to be four queues

The pharmacy counter serves prescriptions, collections, consultations and retail from one line. Is that one queue or four?

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FieldworkAnswered331 views

Ravi SundaramWeek 3, 9 Mar 2027

The pharmacy counter I picked in week 1 has one line. I have been treating it as one queue for two weeks.

Standing there on Saturday I realised it is serving four different things from that line. Prescription drop-off is about forty seconds. Collection is about twenty. A consultation is four to six minutes and happens maybe once every fifteen customers. Retail is a normal shop transaction.

So my “mean service time” is an average across four completely different jobs, and it is not a number anybody in that queue has ever experienced.

Do I split it into four? Do I pick one type and ignore the rest? Or do I need a different site?

5 replies

  1. Marked as the answer

    Priya RaghunathanField session tutorWeek 3, 9 Mar 2027

    It is one queue with four service types, which is a different animal from four queues and much more interesting. Do not switch sites. What you have found is the thing your histogram is going to show you on Wednesday, and most people do not find it until week 5.

  2. Ravi SundaramWeek 3, 9 Mar 2027

    So do I record the service type per customer, or just the time?

  3. Priya RaghunathanField session tutorWeek 3, 10 Mar 2027

    Both, and put the type in its own column. You will want to split the histogram by type later and you cannot go back and add it.

  4. Nell AbioyeWeek 3, 11 Mar 2027

    Same thing at the student services desk. Four types, one line, and the consultations are six times longer than everything else. My mean service time is a number nobody in that queue has ever experienced.

  5. Ravi SundaramWeek 5, 24 Mar 2027

    Coming back to this after the long tail session. Two humps, exactly as described. The short one is collections and the tall one is everything else. This is now most of my report.

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