No Lines for Your Latte at Starbucks!

Tuesday, 5 April 2005 at 8:00 a.m.
SingTel ComCentre, 31C Exeter Road
Sponsored by SingTel

Join Stanford Business School alums and Professor Sunil Kumar for the first-ever live international briefing by a Stanford Business School professor.

At 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, April 5, Singapore will become the first GSB alumni chapter to hold an international videoconference briefing with a Stanford professor. Join us for a great interactive session, network with fellow alumni, and learn how the lines really can disappear at Starbucks or your own company. And, yes, we’ll have plenty of coffee to make sure everyone is awake.

Queuing Theory Meets Your Morning Latte

Imagine you have two counters at Starbucks, one that takes the money and one that serves the coffee. Let’s say you give customers the option of either paying first or getting their coffee first in order to minimize their wait time. We assume customers will always do what is in their best interest. But given that this system may deteriorate, can Starbucks create rules that maintain customer flexibility while also preserving the system and making the lines go faster? Can Starbucks guide customer choices to actually benefit the company? Kumar’s model suggests that a “network” like Starbucks can use queuing theory to optimize the queue.

More broadly, managers in general and operations managers in particular – whether at Starbucks or any other organization – often face situations where the delivery of goods or services is delayed and their firm is swamped by customers or pending work. Professor Kumar will discuss the causes for this congestion, which includes inadequate forecasting and capacity choice, high variability in task times, inadequate risk pooling, gaming by customers, poor choice of scheduling, and other operating policies. Using his analysis of the causes of congestion, Professor Kumar will discuss opportunities for reducing delays and evaluate them from a managerial perspective.

Join us for this lively session and learn concepts that you can put to work immediately. There are just 30 spaces available, so send an email to Richard Hartung at richard@asiapay.biz to sign up now! The deadline for reservations is 1 April 2005. The cost of just $10 covers refreshments. For more details, contact Richard at 9695-8210 or Bob Fox at 9859-0175.  The briefing will be held at the video conference room at the SingTel Comcentre, 31C Exeter Road.

We would like to thank SingTel for their generous sponsorship of the videoconference for this event.