Any establishment in the
pursuit of providing some service to the society cannot be having infinite resources to
make the waiting time for getting served a zero. Hence there must be some kind of queue
that has to be managed in a transparent & just full manner.
Managing a queue becomes much more
difficult when the time taken to serve cannot be predetermined due to various reasons.
The least that the service seekers expect is to be served on First Come First Serve basis.
To ensure this one of the methods that was traditionally followed was to handover recycled tokens to the patients walking
in and make them meet concerned consultant on being called. This manual process is very tedious and prone to human errors,
suspicion of tampering and communication problems among hospital staff. Such problems made it necessary to have automatic
Queue Management System in place.
Following are the essential requirements of a Queue Management System:
- Allow the service seekers themselves to generate next token in the queue along with date & time stamped.
- Allow for several token dispenser units to avoid cluttering of people at one place.
- Allow the service providers to view all the token issued for him at his table only.
- Allow the service provider to call tokens beholder either from waitlisted queue or from the list of persons already called .
- Communicate to the waiting people, the token no. being called both visually and aurally in vernacular language.
- Allow the service provider either to close the token or to retain the Token so that a person can be called again which will be very helpful for consultants like eye specialists.
- Have a provision to deploy more service providers with a common queue so that any service provider can call a token from the front end of this common queue.
- Have provision for various Queue Concepts.