Café D. Pownd Case Study

Introduction
Café D. Pownd is newly opened residence cafeteria in the Cambridge Hall, which was opened from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm, Monday to Friday. It serves 550 residents from both Cambridge Hall and Nottingham Hall by providing hot meals, beverages, salads, desserts, snacks and sandwiches. Its peak hours are 5pm to 6:30 pm everyday which makes the heaviest crowds. The majority of the customers paid with campus-wide electronic payment system.

Problem Statement
Customers are complaining about the waiting time is too long. This could a threat to the cafeteria because if they could not successfully decrease the waiting time, customers would switch to other alternatives. Another critical consideration to this case is that they don’t have large space for the cafeteria. This is the reason why there is congestion during the peak hours. In order to solve this problem, the assistant residence manager, Jason Mah, needs to collect and analyze information and find an effective solution.

Analysis (Quantitative)
According to Mah, the average waiting time for each line is: 1. Line 1=5 minutes 2. Line 2=10 minutes 3. Line 3= 1minute
The precooked and interactive customer base ratio is 2:1 that precooked is more attractive than interactive. The product margin in precooked is higher than interactive meal. Moving customers will increase profits.
According to the spreadsheet we can know, the standard deviation of entrance time of arrival is 3.91. This number increases as the observations grow which means the line is built up at the arrival area. The cashier payment time is at a standard deviation of 0.54 minutes that might need an improvement. Precooked and interactive of standard deviation are 1.19 and 1.07, which is almost the same. Therefore, arrival waiting time is the key to reducing.

New layout (attachment) * Entrance