Problems:
● Maintaining the “cooking-to-consumption” time of 6 hours becomes incrementally challenging as TAPF plans to expand its servicing capacity from 1.4 million to 5 million children in surrounding and remote areas
● Low education level among kitchen workers creates a barrier for the operation improvements guided by the Six Sigma plans
● Further production expansion will create more potential quality issues as volumes increase

Recommendations/Supporting Analysis:
● The most critical step to maintain the ideal “cooking-to-consumption” time is to reduce cooking time of sambar
○ Sambar’s cooking time takes 4 times as long as cooking rice, thus it’s deemed to be a bottleneck in the overall process
○ Dal can be washed and boiled to a semi-cooked state in the previous evening and stored in the cold storage, which could significantly reduce the cooking time for each batch in the morning
● Dedicate the batches of cooked meals to areas of schools based on delivery distance, prioritizing the earliest batch to most faraway school.
○ The most faraway school is 4 hours away from the kitchen, meaning the first batch must be completely cooked by 8 am (delivery goal being 12pm) but no earlier than 6 am under the rule of 6-hours-cooking-to-consumption time.
○ Specific time of start must be carefully examined by Upper/Lower Specification Time analysis
● Design and develop more systematic quality control metrics and automated tools to track production quality as volume increase
○ Expanding Muralidhar’s current 5 quality metrics to incorporate more specific touch points on the production chain, likely to include the most voted “potential causes” as presented by the Pareto analysis
○ Periodically review the quality control metrics to remain up-to-date with ongoing production concerns and newly identified soft spots along the production chain

Tools and