Alice Horowitz is the manager of a popular restaurant in downtown Ottawa called the Blue Bird Bistro.
Question:
Alice Horowitz is the manager of a popular restaurant in downtown Ottawa called the Blue Bird Bistro. She was reading some recent negative ratings and reviews and discovered most of the negative feedback was from customers who said that while they found the service friendly, the waitstaff didn’t visit the tables often and were sometimes hard to find. She knows how detrimental these ratings can be for the restaurant’s reputation, so she went to the restaurant on a busy Friday night to begin her investigation.
Her waitstaff appeared to be busy most of the time, but she did notice that there were often one or two servers in the kitchen, waiting for food to be finished so that they could deliver the food quickly to the tables. At first she didn’t think much of this, but as the night went on she realized that most of the servers seemed to spend a fair amount of time waiting for food in the kitchen, out of sight of the customers.
When the restaurant was sy, Alice herself had a lot to do, so she couldn’t watch the servers the whole night to track their activities. Instead, the next night she devised a simple work sampling plan where about every 15 minutes she would drop into the kitchen and count the number of servers who were waiting on food. The results of her first study (over three hours) are in the table:
Note that when performing a proper work sampling study, the times when the samples take place should be random.
Alice has eight waitstaff working on busy nights. Estimate how much time out of every hour the average server spends waiting for food in the kitchen. Use the work sampling formula to determine how many more observations Alice has to make in order to be sure she knows this proportion within ±5%, with a 95% degree of confidence.
Why might the waitstaff spend so much time in the kitchen? Can you think of any solutions to this issue? Are there any disadvantages to your proposed solution, and ways of mitigating the downsides?
Step by Step Answer:
To estimate how much time out of every hour the average server spends waiting for food in the kitchen we can use the work sampling formula P N1 n1 N1 n1 N2 n2 where P is the proportion of time spent w...View the full answer
Operations Management Creating Value Along The Supply Chain
ISBN: 9781119588726
2nd Canadian Edition
Authors: Roberta S. Russell, Bernard W. Taylor, Tiffany Bayley, Ignacio Castillo
