It’s a relatively classic speciality coffee bar style with the emphasis on coffee and buns and the lunchtime food offering being secondary. He has a range of panini and sandwiches that are sold at lunch and about half of them are sold to order, i.e. made up from scratch. Bob has tried a variety of other solutions (including bought in panini) and feels that this method gives his customers the best taste. He has patiently stood in his coffee bar with his partner late one night and made up all the paninis individually with a stop watch. The time taken for each one varies between 40 seconds and 55 seconds before they are put on the panini grill. He feels that this extra time, over that which will be used to open a package bought from another supplier, is well worth taking and helps differentiate him from his local competitors.
It’s all sound logic. Bob is indeed probably correct.
The problem is that in the real world this isn’t working. The panini are taking a lot longer to make. His staff are ‘faffing about’ and taking up to five minutes to get a single panini ready. Nobody is getting close to the 40-second goal and it is really starting to disrupt his lunchtime service. Worse still, there are a number of mistakes being made and he is running out of crucial ingredients and having to make substitutions.
His local market is generally office workers and they have limited time. It doesn’t matter that Bob’s panini is ultimately better than the competition. If
there’s a queue that takes 20 minutes to get to the end of then that simply won’t work for them – they’ll go elsewhere and indeed that is what is
happening. Bob has spoken to a number of his morning customers who don’t bother with him for lunch for that very reason.
So Bob highlights a couple of his slowest workers and goes through the whole process with them again in an exasperated fashion. They improve a little but others are still slow and there seems to be huge mess created with this increased speed. Bob gets cross and starts the classic owner operator rant ‘You just can’t get the staff!’
What Bob needs to realise is that there are several processes in operation here. One is the physical process and surroundings with which they administer the order. Another is the way that the ingredients for the orders are produced and then stored. And another is the method with which he actually trains his staff. There may be more but at this stage let’s just deal with those three. Bob needs to sit down quietly with his big pad of A3 paper and work out exactly what is going on. He needs to do this after close of business and without distractions. He also needs at least one intelligent and rational member of staff with him who can honestly tell him the problems.
1. The ordering and production process
This process starts with the order from the till which is generally shouted across to the person in charge of making the panini. Sometimes customers want slightly different variations in their panini and this causes problems. These variations all have to be held in the production person’s mind since there is no system for recording it. A number of the products are held in different fridges and there is no set place for them on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes it can take three of four attempts to find where the chicken is or the tomatoes are. Bob maps out the process in detail and looks at each stage. He decides that one of the biggest blocks in the process is the actual order production so puts down as an action point that he needs to look into a new till system that can produce a food order ticket. He calculates that his wastage with incorrect orders is about £50 per month and that doesn’t even cover the hidden cost of the disgruntled customers, so he feels he can afford to spend a little in this area. He also clearly sees that the process is slow because there is no clear system for storing all the prepared products. So he buys a new sandwich prep station which has a row of refrigerated containers at the back and a decent food
service counter at the front. All shelves within the fridge are then mapped out in terms of both food hygiene regulations and also speed of access. This map is laminated and placed on the inside of the fridge. All staff are trained in the new system.
Bob and his assistant set up a new work station and make certain that everything is in place and to hand. He adopts the classic restaurant technique of getting ‘mise en place’ before service. What this means is that everything is properly placed and to hand. This leads him to address the second issue.
2. Preparation
Bob notes that all the preparation is done in an incoherent fashion. People are randomly allocated jobs to do and fit them in and around other tasks. Different people cut things in different ways and in different sizes. There are irregular amounts of prepared ingredients each day which sometimes means that extra items need to be prepped during the lunchtime service which slows everything down.
He breaks the preparation down into specific areas and times exactly how long it should take for each task. He creates rules as to the sizings of items and takes pictures of perfectly ‘prepped’ food. He establishes new hygiene regulations to ensure that not only is the food properly produced, but that it is stored at the correct temperatures and in the correct areas. He establishes minimum preparation quantities for each day and produces a weekly chart to show how this fluctuates with the changing demands during the week.
Finally, he establishes systems for identifying who is capable of producing the food the fastest and looks into making sure that all his staff can more
effectively operate at the same level. Which leads him on to the next stage.
3. Recruitment and training of staff
Bob quickly realises that he has been ‘selling a dream’ to potential employees in an effort to recruit them. He has been painting a picture of an idyllic job where the employees simply make coffee and have great fun in a buzzing, exciting environment.
He has conveniently ignored the harsh realities of food preparation, very busy times, cleaning, and some of the other essential parts of working in any coffee shop. This has created resentment with his staff and this has lead to them,
whether consciously or not, operating in a slow and resistant way when they are producing paninis.
Also they are trained in an entirely ad hoc way in terms of making paninis. He shows some staff how to make a few of them and then hands it over to them to show the rest. Sometimes a new member of staff can be shown how to make a panini by a member of staff who was only shown herself less than a week previously. This results in serious inconsistency and a lack of control over both the gross profit margin and the quality of the product.
Bob goes back to basics. He completely redesigns his recruitment policy and the interview process. He makes sure that all potential staff completely understand what is expected of them long before they ever start and he radically changes how they are trained. He maps out every stage of the process and ensures that every panini that is produced is only created by someone who has been properly trained. He takes pictures of each of the perfect final paninis and records a short video on his camcorder to show all new staff so that he can get his message across without having to be there. He appoints one member of staff to deal with the training and spends extensive time with her initially to ensure that she grasps the importance of this part of the business.