1. Describe a place in your focal organization's service process where if capacity and demand were better matched, the service could operate with minimal waiting.
Typically when a popular movie is released on DVD, the wait times are quite long to receive the DVD. Additionally, Netflix sometimes has limited quantities of DVDs, which, if in high demand, can result in a long wait time, as seen here:
Netflix has done a number of things throughout the years to manage this issue of demand vs. capacity. They used a practice called "throttling" to essentially rate their subscribers and give preference to those who rent fewer DVDs per month. That is, a customer who rents an average of 5 DVDs per month would have priority over another customer who rents 15 DVDs per month if they both had a certain movie at the top of their queue. Netflix has said that throttling has been stopped after backlash from their customers.
2. Are there ways that demand and capacity could be kept more "in line" with one another?
Netflix currently lets its customers add movies to their queue prior to the actual release date, like this:
This can help them predict expected demand of a DVD before they actually have it, and allow them to adjust the number of DVDs for a particular title they make available.
Recently, Netflix has entered into an agreement with Warner Brothers that places a 30-day delay on DVD availability through Netflix for all new releases from the production studio. This was done primarily to protect the revenue generated by DVD sales during the first month for Warner Brothers, but I believe that Netflix can also benefit from this delay in DVD availability. During this time, Netflix will be able to make decisions about the quantity of a title to purchase based on the sales of that title to customers. This practice, if installed, would help Netflix better match capacity to demand.
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