Simulation and Analysis of Pharmacy Prescription and Vaccination Processes

Discrete Event Simulation (DES) modeling and analysis have become an increasingly popular tool amongst the industrial engineering practitioners over the last few decades. DES has furthermore become an advanced tool in many major lean six sigma studies and projects. The MSIE students at the University of New Haven not only are required to complete a full course Simulation Modeling but also must complete a capstone project as a partial fulfilment of the MS degree in that course. To this end, the prescription filling and vaccination processes at a pharmacy in New Haven, Connecticut area was studied and simulated using ARENA® from Rockwell Software corp. The simulation model was also animated for a more realistic visualization of the said processes. After verification and validation of the simulation, the model was run for a standard shift to produce data to compare with the live system. The model produced a relatively long average waiting time in queue and average queue length for both services comparable to the live system. To maintain the system cost unchanged, recommendations were made to rearrange resources (staff) schedules, to increase resource availability during the peak hours on weekdays and weekends in order to reduce the average waiting time and average queue length. A future modeling exercise would need to investigate simulation models with added resources that include cost component consideration.