Kambli, Sinha & Srinivas 2020 — Improving Campus Dining Operations

Service-operations case study published in Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management. Authors are based at the University of Missouri (Marketing + Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering). NOT a process-mining or predictive-process-monitoring paper despite its placement under raw/Predictive process monitoring/. Its relevance to the BPM wiki is methodological: a clean worked example of the DMAIC + Discrete Event Simulation pattern as a process-redesign vehicle.

What the paper does

Applies the DMAIC six-sigma improvement cycle integrated with discrete event simulation (DES) to a real campus dining service (CDS) — an all-you-can-eat university facility serving ~500,000 student visits per year through 8 stations (4 MTO + 3 pre-cooked + 1 beverage). Customer complaint: ~32% of students unhappy with waiting time; 15% defected to off-campus restaurants. Baseline simulated waiting time: 23.24 min.

The DMAIC phases map onto the paper's structure: Define (customer voice, problem identification, layout + process flow), Measure (observation, time studies, distribution fitting — Poisson arrivals with time-varying mean, uniform service times per station), Analyze (fishbone root-cause across People/Method/Environment/Staffing/Material/Measurement), Improve (5 scenarios, simulation, hypothesis testing), Control (cost-benefit + sustainability ranking + managerial recommendation).

Methodology specifics worth borrowing

Process flow diagram of the customer journey through entry → station selection → queue → meal → re-queue or exit (Fig. 3 in paper).
Fishbone root-cause analysis across 6 categories for waiting-time anomaly (Fig. 4).
DES model construction in Simio with distribution-fitted arrival and service times, 50 replications + 1-hour warm-up; validated via t-test between baseline simulation arrivals (412) and observed arrivals (400).
Five redesign scenarios evaluated on a common simulation basis; pairwise t-tests + 95% CI for waiting-time differences.
Multi-criteria evaluation of alternatives along cost, ease of implementation, responsiveness improvement, sustainability — not just waiting-time minimisation.

Results table

Scenario	Waiting time (min)	Δ vs baseline	Fixed cost ($)	Annual cost ($/yr)
Baseline	23.24	—	—	—
S1 Workforce reallocation	16.45	-29 %	200	0
S2 Check-sheet queue mgmt	14.65	-37 %	0	420
S3 S1 + S2	12.74	-45 %	200	420
S4 Arduino kiosk queue mgmt	12.43	-47 %	8200	3100
S5 S1 + S4	11.41	-51 %	8400	3100

All differences vs baseline and pairwise differences among scenarios significant at p < 0.001.

Why this is in the BPM wiki — and where it actually fits

The paper has marginal fit to the wiki's core PPM/process-mining/APM threads:

It is not process mining — no event log analytics, no discovery, no conformance.
It is not PPM — no prediction of running cases.
It is DMAIC + DES — service-operations redesign methodology applied to a hospitality case.

Where it does connect:

Limitations

Single facility — generalisability is asserted but untested.
Single criterion focus (responsiveness / waiting time); food quality, employee training, customer satisfaction not directly modelled.
Capital investment estimates are point estimates without sensitivity analysis.
Online ordering (an obvious extension that would change the queue topology) flagged as future work.

Connections

Concepts:

concepts/devils-quadrangle — explicit cost-time trade-off illustrated.
concepts/bpr-heuristics — workforce reallocation + customer untethering as concrete heuristic applications.
concepts/inter-case-ppm — queueing-system perspective; relevant precedent for PPM features incorporating queue state.

Methods:

methods/process-simulation — DES + DMAIC integration as a worked-example reference.
methods/process-redesign-heuristics — multi-criteria evaluation pattern transferable.

Sources:

sources/2005-reijers-limanmansar-best-practices-bpr — heuristics catalogue this case study implicitly validates.
sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm — DMAIC + DES are textbook BPM lifecycle techniques.