Proposed Queuing Strategies in Releasing Checks, Collecting Payments and Issuing Receipts for Public Schools Employees at the Cashier Section at the Division of Batangas

PROPOSED QUEUING STRATEGIES IN RELEASING CHECKS,
COLLECTING PAYMENTS AND ISSUING RECEIPTS FOR
PUBLIC SCHOOLS EMPLOYEES AT THE CASHIER
SECTION AT THE DIVISION OF BATANGAS

An Advanced Research

Presented to

the Faculty of Graduate School

GOLDEN GATE COLLEGES

Batangas City

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

MASTER IN BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

BY:

KEIZYLEN H. SUBA

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM

Introduction

Waiting in lines is a part of our everyday life. It may be due to overcrowded, overfilling or due to congestion. One of the most important areas in operations management is to understand waiting lines or queues and learning how to manage them.

Any time there is more customer demand for a service than can be provided, a waiting line forms. Waiting time depends on the number of people waiting before you, the number of servers serving in line, and the amount of service time for each individual customer. These situation can also be seen in government offices like in the Department of Education Division Office particularly at the Cashier Section most likely during the end of the month and end of the quarter.

Even though the concepts of waiting for the services or goods appears to come in many differet forms, in general,  customers take waiting as negative construct. The waiting in line for services can often have a negative effect and also creates a negative perception about a particular firm. (Qureshi, et.,al., 2013). These leads to overcrowded hallways which can be noticed during these waiting time due to lack of proper queuing management system.

Waiting lines occur when there is a temporary imbalance between supply (capacity) and demand.  Likewise, customer waiting lines occur when there is too little capacity than what is needed to handle demand, but having more capacity than what is needed to handle demand means that there is idle (unproductive) capacity. (Stevenson and Chuong, 2014) Queuing has become a symbol of inefficiency for an organization. Cashier Section of the Division of Batangas also face the same kind of problems. As cited in the African Journal of Business Management entitled “Measuring Queuing System and Time Standards: A Case Study of Student Affairs in Universities” by Qureshi et.al, despite managing the length of the line, few of the factors that are responsible for long waiting lines or delays in providing service are lack of passion and commitment to work on the part of the staff, overloading of available staff, and insufficient staff etc. These put staff under stress and tension, hence tends to dispose off a customer without indepth probing, which often leads to dissatisfaction.

Sometimes customers may be of several kinds with a definite order of priority for receiving service preemptive (or nonpreemptive) service discipline. The queue discipline indicates the manner in which the units are taken for service. (Medhi, 2003). A waiting line priority rule determines which customer is served next. A frequently used priority rule is first-come, first-served. Other rules include best customers first, high-test profit customer first, emergencies first, and so on. Although each priority rule has merit, it is important to use the priority rule that best supports the overall organization strategy. The priority rule used affects the performance of the waiting line system. (Hiray, 2008). In the case of the subject being studied, some public employees queuing does not have the patience to wait for their turn. Others do not fall in line and directly enters the office eventhough transactions must be done through the window. Because of this, many are complaining and thinking that there is the so called “palakasan” system in the said section. As a result, the queuing system is ignored.

Waiting takes place in virtually every productive process or service. Since the time spent by people and things waiting in line is a valuable resource, the reduction of waiting time is an important aspect of operations management. (Russell, 2011).

In view of the problems and concerns, the researcher came up with a queuing strategies that would provide the cashier section of the Division of Batangas a solution to the problems encountered by the public schools employees in claiming their checks, paying their obligations and getting their receipts.

Conceptual Framework

Queuing is common in daily work and life. In the service process of daily work and life, there are lots of tangible and intangible queuing or squeezing situations. How to grasp the essence of the phenomenon through the queuing phenomenon revealing the inner general law, to optimize the queuing behavior, so that it can improve service efficiency and effectiveness, is a concern of most people. (Clarete et. al, 2016)

Analysis of waiting lines can be an important aspect of the design of service systems. Waiting lines have a tendency to form in such systems even though, in macro sense, the system is underloaded. The arrival of customers at random times and variability of service times combine to create temporary overloads. When this happens, waiting line appear. By the same token, at other times the servers are idle. (Stevenson and Chuong, 2014).

A waiting line system or queuing system is defined by two important elements: the population source of its customers and the process or service system. The customer population can be considered as finite or infinite. Customer population is finite when the number of customers affects potential new customers for the service system already in the system, but when the number of customers waiting in line does not significantly affect the rate at which the population generates new customers, the customer population is considered infinite. (Hiray, 2008)

This study is based on the understanding that most of the difficulties encountered by the cashier section personnel and their customers which are the public employees can be managed using the proposed queuing strategies to manage waiting time.

The study will apply Tyler’s model of the input process output (IPO) paradigm. The first box is called the input, which will contain the status of the clients queuing to claim their checks, pay their obligations and ask for their receipts, marketing strategies are used by the Cashier Section of the Division of Batangas in order to serve the clients in the most fastest way, and challenges faced by the Cashier Section of the Division of Batangas in releasing checks, collecting payments and issuing of receipts. A line with an arrow is drawn going to the process box. It will contain the documentary analysis, questionnaire, and interview, and is then another line with an arrow is drawn going to the next box called the output of the study which will have the proposed queuing strategies to manage waiting lines.