Reducing the Importers Waiting Time in Declarations Directorate Branch at Sri Lanka Customs

Abstract

Sri Lanka Customs is one of the oldest Customs administration in the world. It is a non – ministerial government department, which performs the duties and other taxes and levies in Sri Lanka. D Branch of Declarations Directorate is one of the main branches in Customs. The customers who enter the D Branch have to wait for a long time to get the service. Therefore large queue length can be seen in the Declarations branch. The main objective of this study was to reduce the importers waiting time in counters in Sri Lanka Customs ‘D’ Branch using Queuing theory. The Arena package was used for the analysis. There were two service counters at the D Branch and the arrival rate of customers, service rate, length of queue, idle time and probability of waiting of customers in the queue were calculated for the existing two branches. Then the same parameters were calculated by introducing another service counter and it was found that the length of the queue and waiting time of customers can be reduced by the system with three service counters.