Case Studies

Capacity Optimization

Client: Social Services Consortium, 1999

Balancing Service Improvement Against the Costs of Added Capacity

Service capacity utilization—whether an operating room, a phlebotomy station or a physician—is a major driver of performance. This is especially true today, when the relationship between service utilization and revenue ranges between tenuous and tumultuous.

Optimal capacity is the planner’s goal: too much capacity and the financials suffer; too little capacity burdens the patient and support systems. This project applied queuing mathematics to simulate patient arrival frequency and subsequent service times.

By modeling different configurations of “service channels”, wait list improvements and average wait times could be balanced against the cost of deploying additional service capacity.