Friday, January 20, 2017

The coffee queue problem

I'm sure that we've all been to conferences where we've encountered the 'coffee queue' problem. This is where the conference organisers have organised the coffee table to maximise congestion through coupling of workstations with incompatible dwell times.

Still, how could one expect catering types to understand work flow techniques, I had to study two Masters degrees to gain a decent exposure to them.

This is what we usually have:





















People move through the fast stations quickly, only to crowd the slow stations, with those who can skip a station unable to do so because of the 'log-jam'.

A better way, that I've only too rarely encountered where the different rates of flow are de-coupled:


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