It’s time to do something more impossible than solving world hunger, than boiling the ocean. Tonight, I’ll be answering the quintessential problem that baffled even John Nash.
To solve the incredibly long service times in Mc Donald’s.
How many times have you walked into a sardine-packed Golden Arches and went through the hassle of waiting in line for more than ten minutes, only to realize that you’d have to wait five to ten more minutes to eat your Big Mac because the food that you want still has to be deep-fried (syn. cooked/prepared)?
Now, upon getting your order, paying your five hundred pesos to the cashier (who’s also the person serving you the food), and having to wait another five minutes, because the cashier is short-changed, you lift your tray and you weave through the thick lines and precariously dodge the first rows of chairs and tables, which are frustratingly placed too close to the line.
Well now, I can see that you’re nodding your heads in affirmation. Boys and girls, it’s time to apply what we’re learning in school (you have been listening after all, haven’t you?) and put the shit that’s stored in your ‘noggins into practical use.
Let’s apply Six Sigma and 5S to Mc Donald’s
Of Americans and why everything about them falls short of six
Six Sigma (6σ) is a system of practices originally developed my Motorola to systematically improve processes by eliminating defects (wiki).
Defects, on the other hand, are defined as units that are not members of the intended population (wiki). This is statistically defined as having 3.4 defects per 1,000,000 transactions (in layman’s terms, not having more than 3.4 cases of deviations beyond the allowable variance per 1,000,000 products or services). To easier understand the Six Sigma philosophy, here’s a breakdown of the number of defects per million transactions, and where 6σ is placed:
| The Sigma Levels | ||
| Sigma | Percent Defective | Defects per Million |
| 1 | 69% | 691,462 |
| 2 | 31% | 308,538 |
| 3 | 6.7% | 66,807 |
| 4 | 0.62% | 6,210 |
| 5 | 0.023% | 233 |
| 6 | 0.00034% | 3.4 |
| 7 | 0.0000019% | 0.019 |
For our case, we want to improve the number of customers being served satisfactorily in McDonald’s. Of course, in reality, a Six Sigma project should not have the solutions identified yet. For the sake of this post, let’s pretend that we don’t know the solution yet and we’re going through the process together.
DMAIC
One of the key methodology in Six Sigma is DMAIC, which stands for:
Define – which concerns the problem statement, the objective statement, necessary for identifying the problem.
Measure – which is about understanding the process, validating data accuracy, determining process capability, and setting baseline data.
Analyze – which is basically about forming the relationship of Y = f ( X ) + e (of causality), and screening for potential causes.
Improve – which is about determining, validating, and implementing solutions to achieve the objective statement, and
Control – which is about implementing process control methods and monitoring performance to sustain results.
Finally, to operationally define being served satisfactorily is, it is the amount of allowable idle time where a customer starts to fall in line, to transact their order, to receive a set meal (that is prepared consistently x% of the time. This should be another six sigma project), and sitting down to eat the meal. All of these should be done in about 4 minutes. Taking into consideration the maximum allowable variance of ±1 minute, the ideal time should be between 3-5 minutes (prescribed optimum are estimates, for the sake of discussion). Too early, and errors on food preparation, and money changing may arise. Too late, and customer satisfaction is diminished.
The below figure summarizes the macro process model for a Mc Donald’s cashier-cum-crew in taking orders (sorry for the grubby resolution).
The process begins with the cashier clearing the serving area of clutter from the previous transaction, prepares the tray, and takes the order from the customer.
The cashier then double-hats into a crew role and gathers the order list from the serving bay.
Three control points are first being asked in the general process: 1. does the order contain drinks? If yes, the crew proceeds in preparing the drink. 2. does the order contain sundaes? If yes, the crew proceeds in preparing the sundae, and 3. does the order contain food that needs to be cooked? If yes, the crew instructs the mess crew to prepare the orders and prepares them accordingly.
After putting everything together onto the tray, the fourth control point questions if the entire order list is accounted for.
The cashier issues the receipt, and the final control point asks if he is short changed or not. Everything easy so far?
Now, another quality improvement methodology that would come to play is 5S.
Of Japanese and why everything about them falls short of five
5S is a philosophy that originated in
The real power of this methodology is in deciding what should be kept and where and how it should be stored.
This dialogue builds good clear understanding amongst a workforce of how work should be done and instills an ownership of the process when done efficiently. It is often, therefore, executed in partnership with standard work, which are operations for which these things are used (wiki).
The name derives from its five principal philosophies in Japanese characters, which all begins with “s”.
SSSSS
The 5S’s are:
Seiri – tidiness, organization
Seiton – orderliness
Seiso – systematized cleanliness
Seiketsu – standards
Shitsuke – sustaining discipline.
Identification and objective statement
As a company, the time duration for serving foods are not meeting the scheduling requirements. Overall, this is causing customer dissatisfaction, layout problems, and manpower deployment issues, as well as resource issues, that are costing the company as much as x in lost revenues and x for unnecessary expenditures per year.
We want to reduce the service time from an average of x to 4 minutes, with an upper limit of 5 minutes. this will meet the current maximum goal of x greater than x percent of the time. The new goal will be achieved by x month and year. it will support our serving efficiency goal (of that darn one time deal of being able to serve a customer in three minutes or less, provided that you take your order late at night and no one else is at the burger joint) and achieve an annual savings of x per month and significant implied projected earnings of x per month.
[End of part one]
Part two will talk about identifying areas of improvement. Again, these are all assumptions as there are no statistical information to establish baseline data.
Part two will also take a look at the macro process and reveal hidden processes that take up time (i.e. the rate at which fries are being deep fried are so slow that customers ordering would have to wait as new batches would have to be prepared to accommodate them).
Finally, part three will talk about applying the philosophy of 5S, in conjunction with Six Sigma. For example, the space between the first row of tables and chairs needs to be moved further from the cashier. More cashiers need to be open for service as too few ones are being used, hence the bottleneck effect, and manpower placement has to be thought of, i.e. those people who roam between lines and ask about your order, tallying them in teeny pads. Guess what, they’re not significantly improving the time of you being served. They might as well be put into better use as cashiers or crew people. The horizontal distance between cashiers should be extended as people carrying trays with their orders in it waste valuable time in dodging the lines (not to mention those pesky people who snug themselves across lines to pick up straws).
2 comments:
in operation management the most fundamentally sound and efficient process for front sale service like this one is supposed to be the multi-POS, single line order system. or pretty much what you see in some National Bookstores and Kenny Roger's Roasters. As i'm sure with your experiences as well, sometimes it still doesn't work. What is often forgotten about business operations is how big a factor the quality of the person plays into the efficiency of your system. Something that 6σ and further operation performance metrics have left out. Most of the time the issue is not of the system but how dedicated the staff is at making a system work. More important is how a manager can motivate his staff to be committed and passionate about their job. Intangibles are in play here, where do you find managers, leaders, that have that magnificent talent of making people perform better?
There are then several ways to motivate people, we on our part, as consumers, have a role to play in communicating how the company has accomplished their task. Giving appropriate and natural feedback is most necessary for companies. Emphasis must be placed on "natural feedback" in contrast to requested feedback. Natural feedback is the immediate reaction determined by the overall experience of the service that has been provided for you. Should the natural feedback require you to attach specific slurs to ancestors of the person in front of you then it must be accepted by the service provider and taken as a reflection of their service. So feel free to react to the service positively and moreso negatively. It is the only way that any operation becomes better.
I can see that much comes from the personal involvement in the service industry, hence the systematic macro and sympathetic micro perspectives.
Indeed, 6σ can be dehumanizing. It is after all, originally conceived to remedy manufacturing inefficiency. What many fail to realize is that 6σ, and almost all other quality management process, that it should be grasped like the reins of a horse. It requires finesse, a certain touch of softness, and of care (in this analogy, much emphasis is put to Human Resources).
It is thus a personal opinion that any core team of 6σ (when deployed in a service oriented or transactional project in that matter) should include an IT professional, an Economist, and an Industrial / Organizational Psychologist. That way, Process, Value, and Psychology are on equal footing. An element of check and balance is well in place.
With regards to what is being suggested, yes, it is very much effective as positive feedback creates not only positive reinforcement to the service provider if one would base it the operational conditioning model, but it also creates value, that the work exerted is being reciprocated through positive transaction. This leads to intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy, two concepts that are positively correlated to job satisfaction.
Yet despite the effectivity of this particular human factor operation that is being addressed, an element of proactive output from the service provider, and not merely a reactive one is just as essential, for the company operation’s ultimate success.
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