Airport Convenience Retail and Gift Shop
The Convenience and Gift Shop at the airport, is a retail merchandising service organization. The service involves buying from suppliers at wholesale prices and selling at retail prices. The location of the store and items offered to customers must accord to target customers needs - convenience, accessibility, and availability of needed items. The store management locates and profiles their best customers then works in partnership with its suppliers to provide right products to them. Leadership in this business requires deep insights into customers, products and location.

Key Capability Areas
Merchandising
Store Sales Personnel
Suppliers
 
Mission Statement


Vision Statement
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Creating Retail/Supply System Simulation Models
Creating a simulation experiment to investigate service delivery effective capacity, and capacity decisions related to services to deliver of value to customers involves:
  1. Creating service demand forecast model - This includes information about the average rates at which customers request for services including the breakdown of customer order request types (e.g., for a coffee shop regular coffee vs. espresso, for a barbershop haircut vs. shaves, etc.) – at different times of the day, and the orders' sizes
  2. Creating configuration model for the service delivery operation including the configuration model of the groups of people and equipment resources.
  3. Creating configuration model for the services mix offered by the organization
  4. Creating configuration model for the workforce (people) and their roles as well as their schedules
  5. Creating configuration model for the equipment including operations and maintenance schedules
  6. Creating schedules for the organization's operating calendar - workdays, times and holidays.
  7. Generate/Run operations process simulation models

These production and service delivery systems processes can be analyzed systematically as part of whole organization workflow through simulation methods, to identify potential bottlenecks and inefficiencies for improvements. Simulation enables users to explore maximizing organization output subject to minimizing delays through reducing/eliminating waiting times, improving labor and equipment utilization, etc.

Simulation Output Analysis & Visualization 
The Production and/or service systems simulation enable managers and key operations staff to gain insight into the "real world" capacity problems facing the company, and improves their understanding of the factors that affect production and service delivery performance. The simulation and visualization informs decisions on:

  • Demand Management - Specifying how to match demand to available resources; and tactical allocation of capacity.
  • Process Network Structure - Decision of the layout of the activity network in terms of locations of activities, buffers and interconnections. For example, processes can be organized by activity, or by product line; job shops such as consulting companies, and tool-die-shops often have a functional or process layout, while flow shops such as assembly plants, and chemical processing plants usually have a product layout.
  • Coordination and Information technology decisions on how to coordinate, communicate, and plan execution throughout the network. Coordination is typically a managerial activity and includes assignment of responsibility, incentives, measurements and control.
  • Product architecture decisions on structure and parts to facilitate production.
  • Transportation technology decisions on how goods are exchanged among different activities in the network. This is a key driver in logistics and supply chain management, as well as how insurance policies are moved between the different processing steps.

Simulation informs decisions on the optimum configuration of processes such as:
  1. Supply or Sourcing Decisions - These decisions specify which activities are performed internally, and which activities are outsourced, and how to manage suppliers. Decisions involve defining the process boundaries and interfaces. It includes strategic sourcing decisions, vertical integration, and supply network configuration.
  2. Technology Decisions - These decisions characterize how to process inputs into outputs. It includes the methods and systems employed, as well as the know-how and intellectual property. The technology decisions can be grouped into the following key categories: a) coordination and information technology decisions such as assignment of responsibility, incentives, measurement, and control; b) product technology decisions in product philosophy, product architecture, and product capabilities; c) process technology decisions on how to structure the conversion processes and methods used in execution; and d) transportation technology decisions on how goods are exchanged among different activities in the network.
  3. Demand Forecast Decisions - These decisions specify how to match demand to available supply. These decisions characterize the interfaces and relationships with customers and include demand planning and forecasting, as well as tactical capacity allocation and order management. Demand management is an important driver in inflexible supply processes that cannot quickly adapt to changes in demand such as the core processes in airlines, hotels, hospital wards, and car rental companies, It also relates to service and customer relationship management.
  4. Improvements and Innovation Decisions - These are decisions on characterizing the processes and incentives to improve and innovate products and processes.


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