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February 2001
SHORT REPORT:
Welcome to Throughput
Capacity Management
By Emily Pacifico, Contributing Editor
If you’re
like most people in facilities design, you already have the
general idea,
and maybe a pretty good one, on throughput: Match up the
kitchen, the menu, the
service system and the seating capacity. Nothing exactly new
there.
And if
you’re with one of the really big quick-service outfits,
maybe you’ve refined that
idea to a near-science. But for most of the industry,
throughput analysis remains, shall
we say, imprecise. So even if you have a smooth-running
facility, you know it’s, well,
smooth. But you still don’t know how smooth and fast it
could be.
Harrumph,
you say? Challenge yourself. You know, for example, your
checks or covers
by daypart. You probably know your sales mix by food
product. But do you know your mix
by cook station? Ask yourself how much product gets grilled
per hour, for example. Now
figure the variances by daypart. Now compare that to your
grill area capacity. Now, how
do those factors relate to your seating capacity?
Or how
about your service system? Think through how you coordinate
your
busser-server-runner routine in the context of your
layout, and figure out how that
system influences not only sales but speed of table
turns. You get the idea. The factors
impacting your throughput are far too numerous to list here.
Say Yes,
I Want More…Or Less
But what
if you could get hold of a set of tools that would let you
measure and analyze
every aspect of your operation, from production workload to
service delivery to
equipment placement? And what if the results led to
increased peak period table turns
by as much as, say, 25%, and, without adding staff,
increased kitchen throughput
speed by hundreds of dollars per hour?
Those are
just two of the potential benefits of applying a rigorous,
systematic approach
to “tuning” design and operations that Brian Sill, FCSI, has
been working on. He calls
the process Throughput Capacity Management.
Sill’s
been on the circuit for a year or more now, showing
operators and facilities
consultants alike what he’s found out about fine-tuning
foodservice—and urging
everyone to take a second look at their operations. Along
the way, he’s conducted
panel discussions around the country with execs from such
clients as UK-based Bass
Restaurant Group, which runs five concepts and 460-plus
units; Metromedia Family
Steakhouses, parent to Ponderosa and Bonanza Steakhouses;
and Red Robin,
describing what TCM studies have done for them.
“TCM’s a
process for quantifying brand standards and reworking them
to achieve their
full potential,” says Sill, principal and cofounder of
Deterministics, a management
systems and foodservice consulting firm based in Kirkland,
Wash. Or, described
another way, “TCM is industrial design for foodservice
operations.”
Defining
your positioning in precise terms—your food product, your
sales mix, your
service product and your customers’ expectations—is the
first part of TCM. And getting
your layout and service systems really in line is the
second part.
You
Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure
The
general principals of TCM aren’t new, exactly. What’s new,
though, are the
specifics tailored to the restaurant industry, Sill says. As
a formalized discipline, with
very concrete mathematical tenets and measurement criteria,
TCM is the culmination
of years of R&D by Sill. A veteran of the foodservice
industry for almost 30 years, he long
ago came to the conclusion that “every work position,
process or facility in a restaurant
has a capacity that can be measured, and therefore,
managed.” Or, more simply put, “If
you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!”
Sill
describes TCM as a discipline (note that word, discipline)
that incorporates three key
elements: new measurement tools, predictive brand standards,
and understanding true
potential.
Sounds a
little intimidating, maybe. But Sill maintains that you
don’t need to be an
engineer to re-engineer your business. TCM brand management
tools, simple powers of
observation, a stopwatch, and standardized process steps are
the basics of this new
methodology.
So, how
do you determine the full potential of your foodservice
operation? Sill advocates
a three-step process to achieve a balance of the right
people, doing the right things, at
the right times to grow the business. Step one is to measure
your existing resource
capacities in labor, production and back-of-house design and
equipment. Are they doing
what they’re supposed to be doing, or are people doing
things in their own way, and
every way? (Sill’s term for this is “service variation.”)
Step two
is to measure your guest demand patterns, satisfaction and
dissatisfaction, and
how guests choose to interact with your particular brand.
The third step is to calculate
ideal production and service levels by factoring step one
with step two, balancing supply
with demand.
“The
trick for us is to identify those key areas of data
collection and measurement that
can be easily trained, then automate the capacity
calculations with software so that you
don’t need to be a statistician or industrial engineer to
learn the answer,” he says.
Sounds challenging, but Sill notes the TCM software does
most of the work, automating
the capacity calculations, taking the guesswork out of the
equations.
Better
Work, Better Retention
Once
you’ve measured your true potential, the next step is to
take a close look at how
work is performed via “Work Study Technique,” which enables
an operation to control its
service variation. “The study of work in the TCM discipline
serves to clarify the purpose of
work, or the lack thereof,” he says.
One of
the many measurable benefits of TCM has been the reduction
of employee
turnover, which Sill attributes to reducing divisions of
labor and redesigning work
assignments and stations to encourage employees to connect
with what they do. The
Work Study Technique’s a simple process that doesn’t have to
require a huge
investment of time, but can open your eyes to wasted time
and motion.
As for
back-of-house specifics, smooth kitchen flow is critical to
success. The finest
cooks and the best equipment won’t offset the potential
profit killers of poor design and
too much (or too little) labor.
An Eye To
Cook Deployment
Sill says
his software calculates cook deployment at back of the
house, and enables the
operator to, among other things, explore alternatives to
relieve congestion at peak times,
more convenient equipment placement, and changes to the
facility design itself. In fact,
innovative equipment changes can include right sizing of
chargrills, expo areas, server
stations, buffet stations, fryer and microwave cooking
batteries, as well as simplifying
tabletop designs. In summary, Sill says, “If you put
deployment modeling into the hands
of those who control design decisions, TCM is the connection
between innovation and implementation.”
He points
out that this tactic can cost money if it reveals that
reconfiguring foodservice
equipment could maximize the use of floor space, or even
conclude that some
equipment may need to be added, deleted or changed. However,
in the long run, the
investment in making the necessary changes will be recouped
rapidly with the resulting
new throughput.
Big
Customers, Big Names
Cook
deployment modeling, a core technique of TCM, can profoundly
impact
back-of-house operations—as found when Metromedia decided to
reinvent Ponderosa
from the oversaturated mid-scale budget steakhouse segment
to the fast family casual
segment. A new prototype in Johnstown, Pa., came under
review. A capacity analysis of
the new design revealed that ovens shared by the buffet
cooks and line cooks caused
considerable cross trafficking in production areas. Access
to the single walk-in also
resulted in extensive walk time as cooks gathered their raw
ingredients for production.
Bottlenecks occurred frequently at the buffet fryer area,
while the cookline fryers were
under-utilized.
After
studying the cook deployment model of the new prototype, the
ovens were
consolidated into the highest use area and undercounter
refrigerated and frozen storage
was added to reduce steps and save worker time. All fryers
were consolidated into a
single station with improved worker and equipment
utilization.
These
three relatively simple changes, indicated by the TCM cook
deployment model,
resulted in a 33% reduction in cook labor in the prototype
kitchen. No need to elaborate
on the impact in reducing worker stress, not to mention the
obvious plus-profit
implications.
Sauté-Less In Seattle
It’s not
always possible to rearrange ovens and fryers, tear out
walls or buy different
equipment, of course. TCM advocates taking a holistic
approach to any foodservice
operation and, rather than “thinking outside the box,” Sill
suggests looking at what’s
happening inside the box. The TCM discipline teaches
you to look at all the possible
solutions, from menu to method. There’s usually more than
one way to fix a bottleneck.
A perfect
example of benefits reaped through TCM is the Seattle Space
Needle
restaurant, a popular stop for tourists and locals alike.
Sill was brought in to solve a
problem bottleneck at the sauté position there during peak
periods. Applying the TCM
discipline, he determined that 37% of all guests ordered
items prepared at the sauté
station, which greatly exceeded the daily capacity of the
station. This impacted everything
from recipe integrity to delivery speed and, ultimately,
guest satisfaction.
If you’re
familiar with this famous Seattle landmark, you can guess
that adding more
space to the kitchen to accommodate another sauté station
was definitely not an option.
So with no room at the inn, so to speak, TCM showed that by
reworking the menu, the
demand for sauté was reduced, and as an added bonus, the new
menu increased the
use of the broiler station which was previously
under-utilized.
More With
Less
With the
powerful tools that TCM techniques exert on design and
equipment placement,
what facility designer—operator or consultant—wouldn’t adopt
them into the design
process?
“The real
beauty of TCM is the leverage it affords the whole
organization,” Sill says.
“Once you know your workload distribution from a menu and
facility design standpoint,
this is the same information used in your daily labor
scheduling process that assures
your payback in design efficiencies are realized.”
The
challenge for the future is clear, says Sill. “With
thousands of oversized and tired
kitchens out there, the new launching pad is to measure
existing workflows and devise
design strategies that improve your throughput and reduce
equipment, square footage
and personnel requirements—to do more with less”. |
