Store facility & throughput analysis

A store's wait time is the symptom everyone notices; the bottleneck causing it is rarely the station customers are looking at. Our team was asked to analyze store operations and recommend improvements — which first required establishing where the constraint actually was.

• Mapped store operations as flowcharts, so the process being analyzed was the process actually being run rather than the one people describe.
• Ran process analysis and wait-time analysis to locate where work queued and where capacity sat idle.
• Applied queuing theory to the measured wait times, turning an observation about slowness into a structural explanation of it.
• Tested workflow changes against the identified constraint rather than against the busiest-looking station.

• Recommendations that increased throughput and improved customer service levels.
• Improved resource utilization by moving effort to the station that was actually binding.
• A repeatable method — map, measure, locate the constraint, then change one thing — rather than a one-off set of suggestions.

• Flowcharting
• Process analysis
• Wait-time analysis
• Queuing theory
• Team leadership