What is Queue Management System

A queue management system is used to control queues. Queues of people form in various situations and locations in a queue area. The process of queue formation and propagation is defined as queuing theory.

Queues exist in two main forms:

Structured queues

Here people form a queue in a fixed, predictable position, such as at supermarket checkouts, some other retail locations such as banks, airport security and so on. Very often, queue management systems are set up to manage ticket ranking for a service (with or without a numbered ticket) with identification and thus enable a stress-free waiting (without to wait in a queue, one behind the other). Extending the different possibilities, planned reception by appointment and remotely rank allocation on Smartphone or through SMS can also be included.

Unstructured queues

Where people form a queue in unpredictable and varying locations and directions. This is often the case in some forms of retail, taxi queues, ATMs and at periods of high demand in many situations. Nevertheless organizational systems exist to manage these cases: rank allocation for a service / need / salesperson or simply by reading the customer card. Although many have tried to implement a way of structuring these queues, no one has successfully implemented a management system that works.

"Queuing Theory : A. K. Erlang first studied and developed the fundamentals of queuing systems in the field of telephony. Many of his results are still in use today. In fact, the load on a circuit switching system is measured in Erlang.

Since Erlang’s time, the theory relating to queue properties has been developed, under the domain of Queuing Theory, over the last 70 years, and extensively so in the last 20 years.

The results of queuing theory apply to many seemingly unrelated situations, from serving customers at service counters to managing traffic congestion in a cosmopolitan city, and from designing switching equipment for telecommunications to understanding Internet behaviour."

 
Queue Management Solution:
 
The problem of serving customers in a specific sequence at business or public establishments has been solved in many different ways. Depending on available resources and technology, various mechanical, electronic and computerized systems have been designed and implemented.

The first objective of any queue management system is to achieve a better quality of service to customers. In its most basic form, a queue management system will issue a queue ticket to an arriving customer and later call the ticket when service is available, eliminating the need to stand in line while waiting. In this way, queue management systems help to provide comfort as well as fairness to customers, by allowing them to maintain their position in the queue while they are seated comfortably or engaged in constructive activity.
  
Modern queue management systems attempt to do more than that. Through the use of computerized systems, they help the management by producing statistical reports on information such as arrival rates and patterns, waiting and service times, and default and reneging cases. Based on these statistics, the optimal use of resources can be achieved, helping the trade-off between service quality and service cost. The latest Internet-enabled systems allow remote system monitoring, report generation and system configuration across an Internet link.