Consider a take away restaurant that works with a fixed menu for each day of the week. This restaurant buys the ingredients in advance, undertakes the main cooking process in the previous day and just finalizes the food preparation on the day, based on the specific orders received. The process used to serve the customers is described below.

There are three employees taking orders and payment from customers. The average time it takes for an employee to take an order and receive payment is 80 seconds. The orders are then sent electronically to the kitchen and the customer waits to receive the order. In the kitchen there are 14 employees that prepare the orders. On average, each of these employees takes 6 minutes to prepare each order. At the end of the process, there are four

employees that take each prepared order from the kitchen, check the quality of the food, put it inside a bag, together with the required drinks, and deliver it to the respective customer. On average, it takes 90 seconds to get the order from the kitchen, verify the quality, get the drinks, put all inside a bag and deliver it to the respective customer.

a) Assuming that there are no other restrictions regarding the capacity of this process and that all orders meet the quality requirements, calculate the average hourly theoretical capacity of each activity, identify the bottleneck(s) for the process and estimate the maximum hourly capacity of the process.

b) Assume that on a busy evening, the process works according to the maximum capacity of the bottleneck(s). Estimate the average utilization rate of each employee.

c) Suppose that during the quality check undertaken in the last step, the employees identify food that does not meet the requirements. In this case, the food for these orders needs to be prepared again. Discuss the consequences of this in terms of the maximum capacity of the process and average utilization rates.

d) Characterize the P:D ratio involved in this restaurant and discuss the main consequences of this for planning and control.