In an old Mckinsey and Company article I found recently, there was a small snippet case study that caught my eye. They share an experience of a Restaurant Kaizen, or maybe a fast food chain, that applied the principles of Lean Thinking with amazing results. There are also clear applications of queueing theory in a restaurant that can yield improvements.
In their words,
The [restaurant] mapped daily changes in demand to highlight fluctuations, introduced a self-service counter, and redesigned kitchen and food preparation procedures to standardize sandwich making and eliminate waste, which consequently fell by 40 percent.
Meanwhile, labor costs dropped by 15 percent and service times improved by one-third. Best of all, sales increased by 5 percent and margins on affected products more than doubled, since employees could spend more time influencing customers and less time apologizing to them.dropped by 15 percent and service times improved by one-third. Best of all, sales increased by 5 percent and margins on affected products more than doubled, since employees could spend more time influencing customers and less time apologizing to them.
Visually, the improvements in sandwich making and service to the customer can be seen below:
It’s Your Turn
What other unique applications of Lean Principles have you seen?
Lean principles are widely used in quick-serve restaurants. For example, the queue management at a Subway or Chipotle is a perfect example of controlling work in process. Only four or five customers are allowed into the process at a time and the rest wait in a highly visible queue. Holding the queue outside the process benefits both the customer (easy to judge wait times) and the restaurant (no semi-finished orders and predictable service times).