How long do patients wait?

This week’s The Numbers Guy column in the Wall Street Journal looks at how long patients wait for care (Long Medical Waits Prove Hard to Cure, May 25). The setting to have in mind is not how many minutes past your appointment time you spend in the waiting room. Rather, focus on actually getting an [...]

Read Full Post »

Customs queues

The Numbers Guy column in today’s Wall Street Journal relates to our recent post on delays clearing customs at Heathrow (Border Delay Data Leave Fliers Up in the Air, May 5). He hits on a number of points similar to what we brought up. First, demands are going to be very peaked over the day. [...]

Read Full Post »

Queues become political at Heathrow

Here at the Operations Room, we like queues — not so much standing in them but talking about them. Indeed, about the only thing better than us talking about queues would be if queues became a political issue and people with impressive job titles were forced to talk about them. And that is exactly what [...]

Read Full Post »

How Home Depot tackles queues

Yesterday, we looked at how Disney was taking on lines; today, Home Depot is up. Fast Company has a brief article on what the home-improvement chain is doing to keep customers moving through its stores (Home Depot Innovates Customer Checkouts, Apr 16). The article points to four things (which are numbered on the diagram below): PLASTIC [...]

Read Full Post »

Disney Queue Management, The Next Generation

Few companies are as celebrated for their ability to manage queues and customer waits as Disney. As we have posted about before, The Mouse has raised moving people through lines to a science (even as their Anaheim neighbors have screwed up queues). Now Fox News reports on a Disney program called NextGen that will take [...]

Read Full Post »

Paying when patients wait

The Daily had an interesting story on a handful of doctors who are paying their patients — either explicitly in cash or in the form of a gift — when they make their patients wait past their appointment times (Their Wait in Gold, Mar 19). There’s a promising new trend afoot in doctors’ offices around [...]

Read Full Post »

Even Angels can’t manage queues

Selling baseball tickets should be easy — especially if it is before the start of the season and fancy revenue management schemes haven’t kicked in. But the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (hereafter, simply the Angels since they have the stupidest, most awkward name in the majors) managed to screw it up. Here is how the Orange [...]

Read Full Post »

How do you make the wait for the cable guy shorter?

No one likes waiting around the house for the cable guy or a furniture delivery or the repairman. There is inevitably the sense of being held hostage, unable to run out for a coffee or to jump in the shower. Add in the psychic (if not explicit monetary) cost of skipping work, and the stress [...]

Read Full Post »

Lines, lines, lines!

Regular readers of this blog know that I like eye candy and can rarely pass up a styling graphic. Today’s Wall Street Journal obliges with a great one on a subject near and dear to my heart, queues! (Find the Best Checkout Line, Dec8) Check it out. It even mentions Little’s Law! Here is a [...]

Read Full Post »

Fining airports for long security waits

Security lines are the  bane of the air traveler’s life. So what if there were clear standards that had to be hit? That gets us this news release from Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA Requires Changes To Security Queue Measurement At Heathrow And Gatwick, Oct 12): As part of its regulation, the CAA imposes strict targets [...]

Read Full Post »