Examining the layout design for better queuing management in the sales department of Roofings Limited

Abstract

According to Roofings Annual Report (2014), it takes 30 minutes to process an order from sales department to production department on average. While management has undertaken several actions to reduce this time, the current layout continues to hinder these efforts as queues continue to grow. This paper aimed to study the current layout to pinpoint flaws; examine the waiting and serving time (Capacity Utilisation); evaluate the service personnel performance; and propose a better layout design model for better capacity management. Simple Random sampling was used to select Roofings’ employees. Structured interview was applied to find out any other related information. Closed questionnaire was used to collect large amounts of information from a large number of respondents. Questionnaires were given to customers, sales executives, and managers in sales department. The study revealed that majority of the clients waited between 5 to 9 minutes before being attended to. The overall process time was 32.9 minutes with majority of customers that came in the morning using the least time (20-29 minutes). The mean preferred serving time was 23.75 minutes with standard deviation of 6.194. During lunch time the quality of service offered to customers drops with 32.20 per cent of the respondents disagreeing with the quality. The researcher recommends the current layout to be changed because the findings revealed that the current layout can only serve 9 per cent of the customers within the designed service time of 10 to 20 minutes. Adopting the proposed layout will ensure that all the serving points are visible to customers. Keywords: Waiting time, Serving time, Layout design, Performance, Capacity management