Question 2: If you made one of these changes to the ice cream store, how would you decide if it improved the store’s operation?
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In other words, what are the performance measures? Here are some possible measures: number of customers
served per day, time customers spent in the store, the waiting time of customers, the number of customer
waiting, and the utilization of servers. We will discover these are common performance measures and will
often be your first performance measurement choices.
Question 3: How can you expect to improve performance if you don’t know what is going on inside the
ice cream store?
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You need to employ all the descriptive tools you know to understand what is going on inside the system. At
this stage, one might create a value stream map, a flow chart, a relationship chart, a spaghetti diagram, etc.
These techniques will greatly improve your understanding of what happens to customers and the attendant
during the sale of an ice cream cone. Perhaps you develop the conceptual model (i.e., flow chart) presented in
Figure 1.2.
Customer Served
(capacity limited)
Customers
Arrive Customer Exits
P