Over the past ten years, simple and inexpensive operations research and management software that is user friendly to the mentor, student, and instructor has become more difficult to obtain. Emmons, Flowers, Khot, and Mather’s STORM 4.0 for Windows, which is one of the primary student learning tools, is a 16 bit program and will no longer perform efficiently on a 32 or 64 bit system. Therefore it is no longer in print. After a diligent search, it appears that there is no adequate inexpensive software that is easily available. Current software such as SAS-OR and Microsoft Project, that provides algorithms for queuing theory is too costly. Although all UNC universities have a license from SAS Institute, SAS-OR is not covered by the agreement. This unique site license would be more than what the university or the Department of Management and Accountancy could afford. This paper presents pedagogy from a systems approach using Microsoft Excel. A spreadsheet file was created that successfully applies queuing theory which is the mathematical algorithm for waiting lines, or queues. Queuing theory has seen contemporary applications in the field of telecommunication, traffic engineering, computing and the design of factories, shops, offices and hospitals. Data was collected from a Western North Carolina local bakery and food service business. The arrival times were Poisson and the service times were normally distributed. From this analysis a spreadsheet model was constructed to be used both nationally and internationally. Several different problems were analyzed. These calculations showed that the spreadsheet model was correct. The major advantage to the practitioner, engineer, instructor and student is that Excel is readily available on all personal computers, easily understood, and is very practical. Students with very little exposure to queuing theory will be able to master the method within the first hour of exposure.
