Huge Restaurants: Trade off between Factory thinking and Experience thinking

Two recent articles in WSJ have pointed out some operations of mega restaurants - both are worth investigating.  The first is from the largest restaurant in the world in Damascus.  Here is the video:



After watching the video, operations management folks like myself get a bit excited to think about the shear planning and organizing it takes to produce and deliver so much food every night.  The kitchen essentially becomes an efficient factory and the head chef like a plant manager. 

The next article is about the Tao in Las Vegas, sorry no video, but here a couple of pictures and quotes:

Seconds count because Tao's kitchen serves 1,400 dinners on a typical Saturday night, making it one of the busiest high-end restaurants in the country. While partially cooking dishes in advance isn't unusual in restaurant kitchens, doing so with quick-cooking fish is. That's one way Tao is able to keep the plates moving fast enough to get its legions of diners fed

click to see full size

Although it is only open for dinner, Tao operates 24 hours a day, preparing Chinese, Japanese and Thai-influenced cuisine. On Saturdays, the busiest day, the restaurant employs 57 cooks, eight chefs, 26 servers and 10 hostesses. It goes through 1,400 pairs of chopsticks, 50 pounds of rice and three gallons of Heinz ketchup—a key component of its kung pao sauce. A four-person set-up team folds 1,800 napkins, stocks bars with lemon, lime and apple slices and prepares Tao's over-the-top (think 20-foot-tall Buddha statue) dining room for the night, including lighting 269 candles. One employee does nothing but sweep for his eight-hour shift.

"In Las Vegas, everybody is looking for the big experience," says Rich Wolf, co-owner of the Tao Group, which owns Tao Las Vegas, 11 other restaurants and seven nightclubs in New York and Las Vegas. "It isn't your first thought for a quiet, intimate date," but it's where "people can go to when they want to be festive and celebrate and paint the town red."

The restaurant is part of a 60,000-square-foot complex that also includes a lounge, the popular nightclub and Tao Beach, an outdoor club (closed in winter) with a dance floor, pool and cabanas that offer food, drink and massages. Tao's strategy is to keep people under its roof, and spending money, all night long. Dinner is treated like a pre-party for the wilder antics upstairs at the nightclub. On a recent evening, two barely-clad models hired by Tao frolicked in a rose-petal-filled bathtub near the dance floor.

 I suggest reading the entire article - it is fun to get a glimpse at how they do what they do.

I was struck, however, at the contrast between these two examples.  The first Damascus video was nearly entirely focused on the operational execution that needs to take place every night - chopping, prepping, ordering, inventory, etc.  The article about the Tao also spent considerable time on the topics of inventory, receiving, and food production, but on the other hand it emphasized the work that is put into creating experiences, for example:

By 10 a.m., the four set-up staff started preparing the dining room. One employee donned a harness and ropes to scale the 24-foot-high red wall and place rechargeable lights in the 48 candles highlighting the Buddha that rises above a pool filled with swimming Japanese carp. A representative from the Venetian hotel's floral department replaced the rose petals that filled the eight tubs dramatically lining the entrance to the restaurant.

I have no way of knowing if the Damsus restaurant does not spend similar resources on experience creation, but I think the contrast is interesting.  One one hand, the factory approach is essential to ensuring consitent quality and delivery of food and the food certainly influences the experience.  But, the experience must also consist of more than just the food and the Tao understands that well. 

It is interesting to think about what the right mix of factory/production thinking and experience design thinking is right for specific service and how much resources should companies place in each area.  I suppose it comes down to where the value is being created - is it the output of the kitchen (factory) or the atmosphere and experience of the dinning area.  How much weight do customers put on each aspect?   If a service designer is too biased toward one side or the other (factory vs experience thinking) what will happen? 

Can you get too lean, be too fast?: The Starbucks Experience at risk

Although I am not a coffee drinker (if you are interested -here's why), I found the recent article in the WSJ very interesting.  It is about the direction that Starbucks is taking its processes. A while back Starbucks tried to take ideas from lean manufacturing trying to find ways to shave seconds off their service process.  Here is an example from the article of the things they found:

That team discovered that many stores kept beans below the counter, leading baristas to waste time bending over to scoop beans, so those stores ended up storing the beans in bins on the top of the counter. 

Although So, that sounds great except  that it turned out that baristas seemed to get a bit too efficient at the expense of their core product:

 Amid customer complaints that the Seattle-based coffee chain has reduced the fine art of coffee making to a mechanized process with all the romance of an assembly line, Starbucks baristas are being told to stop making multiple drinks at the same time and focus instead on no more than two drinks at a time—starting a second one while finishing the first, according to company documents reviewed recently by The Wall Street Journal.

 The WSJ article makes it sound like Starbucks is making the changes for the sake of product quality, mainly that by working on too many drinks at a time, drink quality goes down.  This could be the case if each drink may take slightly longer than if it was worked in isolation. It seems baristas don't buy the time saving part, they claim that the new policies will make things slower.  One of my favorite lines in the article:

When asked whether changes have created longer lines in the test markets, Starbucks spokeswoman Ms. Smith said she didn't have "that level of detail."

Hmmm, pretty sure that means either, we didn't think of that (unlikely) or "well, yes, but it will be better for the customer." Will it? 

Quality might also be reduced  in multi-drink-proccessing because each drink has its own process unique from the one before and after making mistakes more likely.  So, the new policies are acting as a sort of mistake proofing, poke-yoke if you will.  This may insult the multitasking capabilities of the baristas, again a tough sale.

So, where does this bring us?  Is it better for a process to be faster with a slightly higher risk of mistakes and un-freshness or should baristas be told to slow down at the sake of longer queues?  This is not an easy question to answer, hence(in my opinion) the more interesting problems that arise in service operations.

My opinion is that Starbucks has seemed to find a paradox: applying operations management principles directly into a service process might impact the customers experience.  If asked what makes service operations management different from manufacturing operations a good answer would be that services involve customers in the process - you have to consider what they do and what they think about what you do.  For traditional manufactured products, customers don't particularly care about how a product is made apart from that it has the features and quality that they expect.

Starbucks barristas seemed to be forgetting that they are in the service business.  If they were making coffee in a bottling plant then efficiency is the best principle, but because customers are in front of them seeing and experiencing (and paying a hefty price for) the process of making their drink they may need to emphasize something different:

To boost the freshness of the coffee and to bring back some of the "theater" that had been lost, the baristas also started grinding beans for each batch of coffee, instead of grinding the day's beans in the morning

Starbucks sells more than the liquid in the cup, it is in the business of the experience of the "fine art of coffee making" (at least it used to), but because of its popularity and high demand it has transformed into a service factory - spitting out drinks as fast as possible.  The danger is that it is losing its hard fought brand promise. 

So, what would you do if you were Starbucks management?  How do you handle the barristas fear that lines will get longer?    Who do you side with - baristas, customers, management?  What are the needs and concerns of each of these groups?  How are these needs and concerns out of balance and how can you align them?  

Assorted Links

Robot waiters taking over:  here and here

Low fare, pay per use hotels:  here

Mass producing real hand painted art: here

Hotels using social media as quality assurance tool: here

Good example of a service "stage" Disney style: here