Issue link: https://industrialengineer.epubxp.com/i/905872
36 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine Simulated dining offers tasty options The architect and hospital wanted to select the design with the greatest throughput to meet the location's customer processing needs. The design was required to meet more than 400 trans- actions during the peak hour. Virginia Commonwealth University's hospital manage- ment team specifically required that an industrial engineer be included in the validation of the design. This integrated proj- ect necessitated that the retail design (customer journey) was in balance with the functional design (peak hourly capacity). As the team plowed through the different design options, a key metric was to understand the service bottlenecks in each of the stations that could hamper throughput. A few examples of these included decoupling the condiment station from the grill and from the hot entrée station. These moves meant that customers applying condiments to their plates would not delay employees who were serving plates at each of the serving sta- tions. The location and design of the soup and the salad stations were also important. The design team needed to make sure that there was redundancy at each of these stations so that sev- eral guests could serve themselves simultaneously. Another key parameter to analyze was the number of pay registers in the design. At the end of the day, one could de- sign speed at each of the production stations, but if the system did not have enough capacity to process the final payment, a bottleneck would be stuck at the last point in the service chain. Figure 3 shows a number of metrics at each of the stations, along with the corresponding queues, for several design sce- narios. The top line in the chart shows a throughput compari- son of the current design, to the new design options with five and six registers (POS stands for point of sale device), along with other design parameter changes (e.g., grill processing ca- pacity and register time). You can also read the impact to some of the key metrics in each of the stations, including average queue (AVG Q) and speed of service (SOS), along with station throughput. FIGURE 3 Alternative working realities Different design scenarios produce different metrics for Virginia Commonwealth University's hospital cafeteria, including average queue (AVG Q), speed of service (SOS) and station throughput. VCU Cafeteria