The success of a good restaurant depends highly on the efficiency of its processes. Operations management is the tool that assures these processes are working to the best of their abilities, and finds ways to better the restaurant as a whole. In this blog I will be explaining the benefits of using operations management with waiting lines, layout, inventory, and technology.




Waiting Lines

To a customer, there is nothing worse than an unnecessary wait. Improving wait times does not only lighten the mood of customers, it also speeds up the whole dining process. This allows room for a higher capacity of customers to dine, and also an increase in sales.

Possible solutions to long waits, from an operations management perspective, may be found by investigating why the current process of seating customers is taking too long. A good way to discover bottlenecks in the current process is by looking into each step and picking out what is unnecessary, and time costly. For example, a table left vacant for up to 10 minutes, because it is not yet cleaned, would be seen as wasted opportunity. If you had 5 tables an hour that each waited for 10 minutes to be cleaned, that is a total of 50 minutes. This is enough time for an average customer to have ordered and finished their meal. This inefficient process can be eliminated by simply hiring a busser that potentially can cut table maintenance time down to 2 minutes, and will give the restaurant an 'extra' table of customers per hour.




Layout

The layout of a restaurant does not only help design the atmosphere one wants to portray, it is also the path taken by every server, bartender, cook, and employee. As mentioned above, each moment in the restaurant industry is crucial, and extra steps account for time that could be better spent attending customers, or doing other duties to help the restaurant.

To find the most efficient layout for a restaurant we must consider what the major centralized areas are; usually being the front door, the bar, and the opening to the kitchen. By locating these areas in more central locations to workers, it saves valuable steps and time. Locating a circular or horseshoe-shaped bar in the middle of the restaurant gives many access points to servers from any area of the restaurant. Opposed to a bar located in a corner where servers at the other end of the restaurant will have to walk much further for each trip to the bar, (on average servers make at least 6 trips to the bar every 30 minutes). The circular shape also discourages ‘traffic-jams’ made by anxious servers and often ends in the spilling of drinks.






Inventory and Technology

Because of the short shelf-life of food, especially fresh food, the process of keeping restaurant inventory is very sensitive. This is why it is so important to have an effective system in place that minimizes the amount of wasted food. To learn more about restaurant inventories visit restaurant solutions inc.

Most restaurants use some type of computer system such as Micros or Squirrel, to manage inventory. These systems calculate the amount of food that is used each week and gives us an average so that we can make a good estimate of what is needed for the next week's inventory. Software systems are also used as a type of communication between the front of house and the kitchen, minimizing room for miscommunication.


This blog was made by Raina Baynton for the purposes of Operations Management 1100 in the Business Management course at BCIT.


References

My experiences working in restaurants for 4 years.
Second Canadian Edition of Foundations of Operations Management
http://www.earl.ca/