Improving the Student Navigation Center One Minute at a Time: Using Queuing Theory to Predict Wait Times

Abstract

The Student Navigation Center at Salem State University is a one stop shop where students can receive help for anything they need. It includes Financial Aid, the Bursar's office, the Registrar and the Clipper Card Office and provides several services to students. A one stop shop is a great way to better services to students, but along with the implementation many problems can arise such as congestion and long wait times. The Student Navigation Center has made several improvements since they first transitioned into a one stop shop in order to better their services to students and make things as easy and quick as possible. However, there have been several complaints in regards to lines being very long and students wanting to know how long they are going to be waiting before they can go inside. Queuing theory is an analysis tool that can predict wait times and improve those times by adjusting the arrival rate, the service rate or the number of servers. This paper analyzes the improvements made along with further improvements that need to be made at the Student Navigation Center and provides a queuing analysis for the Financial Aid and Student Accounts services. These services were chosen due to their high importance to students and the high volume of students that come in for problems or questions relating to them. The paper gives an idea of how the Student Navigation Center functions and what they have done to help their students and the queuing analysis shows what can be done to further serve the needs of students by predicting and improving wait times for Financial Aid and Student Accounts.