Determining Cashier Staffing Policy with SAS Simulation Studio

Being relatively new to the Egyptian market, the Egyptian wholesale/retail stores face a serious problem with the management of its Point of Sale (POS) which can be easily recognized by the long queues in front of these POSs affecting the service time, reducing customers´ satisfaction and, in many cases even, blocking the shopping area which affects the flow of customers in the store. This paper presents a real case study conducted in Egypt in which discrete-event simulation was deployed to optimize the cashier staffing policy in Egypt´s largest local hyper market. SAS Simulation Studio was the cornerstone of the implementation framework that integrates several analytical tools to effectively model and analyze the real-world system behavior in an Egyptian hyper market. The framework allows examining the effect of POS staffing policy on various service performance measures (waiting time, service time, etc.) providing a means to support the store management in their quest for enhancing their customers´ experience with minimal additional costs.