A Quantitative Approach to Measure Organisation Performance

This paper applies a mathematical model for dealing with staffing levels in organisations. The model in the present study is the deterministic reneging queuing model (M/M/c–D) where customers lose patience after a deterministic time and leave the queue without being served. Inter–arrival times of customers and service times follow exponential distributions. Staff in an organisation here are treated as ‘servers’, while incoming work is considered as ‘customers’ of the system. Staffing levels are examined from an output or production orientation in situations where a moderate number of workers function as a pool of staff that performs similar operations. Experiments on different staff sizes were conducted to confirm the validity of the model. Both the experimental results and the models indicate that there is an optimum level of staff which maximises the ‘profit’ of an organisation. The paper provides a practical tool for managers in identifying staffing size for his or her crew. However, the research is limited to the cases where the inter–arrival time of customers and the service time follow exponential distributions, and the maximum acceptable waiting time of customers is deterministic.

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