1. Draw a process flow chart showing how customers were processed through the operation. What does this suggest about the process design of Cadbury World?
2. Calculate the hourly capacities for each micro-operation. How does Cadbury World management vary capacity to respond to changes in demand? How could the service be amended to increase bottleneck capacity?

Nearly all visitors arrived by car or coach. Parking for cars was arranged in three areas, with a total capacity of 484. Separate spaces could accommodate 24 coaches and there was a picking up/setting down area close to the main exhibition. Records suggested that on a representative weekday (during school term time), 15 pre-booked coaches and about 204 cars came to Cadbury World. Typically, there were about 35 visitors per coach and three per car.

The site was served by two other means of transport, inheritances from its industrial past: to the rear of the factory were a railway station and a canal pier. Some visitors came by train and there were a few commercial barge operators who ran tourist trips from the centre of Birmingham out to Bournville. However, the plant layout meant these visitors had about a 10-minute walk around the perimeter of the factory before reaching Cadbury World. This path has been signed as The Factory Trail. In practice, less than five per cent of customers arrived by train or barge.

The exhibitions reception area had three tills. Two were for individuals and the other was for the leaders of coach visitor groups. The ticketing system had been the subject of experimentation, the latest being a timed ticket. This printed out a specific 10-minute time slot on a batch of tickets. However, computer problems meant that this had not been successfully implemented during 1991.

The booking system for groups required organisers to specify their groups time of arrival and to pay a 25 deposit. The maximum size for any single group was set at 60 people. Cadbury World scheduled coaches at regular times throughout the day to space the arrival of groups. Because of the difficulty of estimating the duration of road journeys, coaches often arrived late and missed their agreed times. This added to the queues of visitors at the exhibitions entrance at busy periods.

The entrance to Cadbury World had low barriers funnelling individual visitors toward the tills. Beyond these, the reception area gave access to the exhibition, the shop and the restaurant. Sometimes this area was used for attractions such as a honky-tonk piano player. At other times, a TV continuously played a four-minute video previewing many of the features visitors would see at Cadbury World. This included many parts of the interior of the exhibition, the packaging plant, and short extracts of other videos which were running inside Cadbury World.

The entrance to the exhibition itself was via a pair of unmarked double doors. A ticket collector stationed here controlled the number of visitors entering. The ticket collector judged the number of visitors to be admitted at any time, simply by periodically entering the exhibition and checking the number of visitors before Bull Street, which marked the end of the first part of the exhibition. On average, in a busy period, 1520 visitors were let in every two and a half minutes. For most of the exhibition, visitors had no guides.

The first section of the tour described the ancient origins of chocolate and tried to capture the atmosphere of a South American jungle. Visitors entered a darkened room which was dressed with artificial trees and lianas. Among these, static wax models of South American Indians were shown making and drinking chocolate. The narrative of the story was carried on a variety of short sign-boards and continued, a little further on, by a continuously playing video documentary lasting three minutes. Jungle sounds were played over loudspeakers. Most visitors passed quickly through this section, treating it almost as a decorative entrance to the exhibition.

The visitors then passed a scene featuring a representation of Hernando Cortes, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico, beyond which the jungle abruptly ended. This area had a serving hatch and a sign invited visitors to take a small plastic cup of liquid chocolate (like the Incas used to drink). A swing-top bin was positioned next to the hatch for the disposal of used cups. This section was supervised by a member of staff, who explained: We have problems with some of the children. They take five or six of the cups, cover themselves in chocolate and make themselves ill.

Visitors then passed a pictorial wall-mounted display, and moved (still at their own pace) into the European Room, which described the introduction of chocolate to Europe. To the rear, the faint sounds of the jungle could usually still be heard. Beyond this section, visitors entered Bull Street, a replica of a cobbled Georgian street, with authenic-looking shop windows. An attendant in Bull Street halted the flow of people to form groups outside a door to the next part of the tour, the Marie Cadbury Room. This had seating for 16 and surrounding standing room. At peak times as many as 70 people could be accommodated in the room, although it was originally designed for only about one-third of this number. After the doors closed, there was a five-minute automated show explaining the early days of Cadbury, using taped voices and three static, illuminated scenes. This was controlled by an attendant, who was responsible for closing the doors and starting the automated sequence. Completion of the show was indicated to the attendant by an unobtrusive light, which was the prompt to open the doors to allow the next group in. However, the attendant generally waited for about one minute before opening the entry doors. In this time, some of the preceding group, realising that the show was over, started to look at the wall-mounted exhibits in the room, whilst others began leaving the room via the marked exit, moving to the next section of the exhibition. Only when the attendant finally opened the entry doors, the remainder finally began to make their own way out. Filling and emptying the Marie Cadbury Room took an average of about four minutes, although this did increase for very large groups.

The next area comprised pictorial exhibits explaining the history of Cadbury, Bournville village and the social background to the firm. At one end of the room, a video entitled Making Chocolate ran for three minutes. Beyond this was a mockup of an old factory entrance, with a working clock and clocking-in cards. The entrance has two gates marked MEN and WOMEN, as did the original factory. Families were momentarily separated at this point. This interactive section of the exhibition was often a cause of amusement, with older visitors explaining to children how the clock worked.

Throughout the exhibition, different types of visitors spent their time in different ways. Most pensioners liked the videos, but skipped most of the written materials. School groups, however, tended to focus on the notices and narrative material. An educational task sheet, available for children from the reception, was a way of holding these visitors attention. From here, visitors left the new building and directly entered part of the factory, originally known as the East Cocoa Block. The contrast was marked: the ambience here was typical of a factory built in the 1930s. The floors and stairs were concrete, and the walls bare, cream-painted brick. Surprisingly, there was little smell of chocolate.

What the visitors saw next depended on whether the factory itself was running. The factory had scheduled maintenance shut-down periods of about 37 days per year. When the factory was working, visitors could see the Packaging Plant. At other times they missed this out and went directly to the Demonstration Area. It was clearly indicated in advance that the Packaging Plant was not guaranteed to be open every day. Nevertheless, a few visitors became quite annoyed if they could not visit it because of these shut-downs.

The Packaging Plant

This was located at second-floor level and reached by the original factory stairs. There was a ground-floor waiting area for visitors in wheelchairs who could not reach the packaging plant since there was no lift. At the top landing a queue formed in front of a TV playing Cadburys adverts. The tour comprised a route with three stopping points or stations. A guide collected a group of around 30 people from the landing and led it to the first station. Here there was a short video showing the factory, with a commentary added by the guide. Following this halt of about three minutes, the guide led the group to the next station. On the way, they would usually pass the preceding group returning from the second station. This caused some confusion and delay, as the groups passed on a narrow walkway. The guide then marshalled the group at the second station (about 30 metres from the previous one) from where the packaging machinery could be seen and heard. The Packaging Plant itself was a very clean area in which white-coated attendants and engineers could be seen monitoring the wrapped bars of chocolate rolling off the line. The format here was the same: a brief video explained the packaging process, and a live commentary was added by the guide. Visitors were sometimes surprised to see that some guides read their commentary from handwritten prompt cards. Next, they followed the preceding group and retraced their steps, meeting another group on the walkway. Before leaving this area the guide halted, giving another brief explanation, and then offered visitors chocolates from a tray. On warm days, visitors were offered paper towels on which to clean their fingers. The Packaging Plant section of the tour was generally completed in about eight minutes.

The Demonstration Area

This part of the tour was run in guided groups of about 15 people. At peak times, up to eight guides were on duty. Guides had the option of addressing their groups with their own voices or, for larger groups, by means of a portable microphone. Visitors were encouraged to ask questions. There were normally several groups on the circuit round the demonstration area (which is shown at Figure 11.2).

The Demonstration Area was on the ground floor and showed a number of production processes carried out by about seven staff on small, old technology machines. These machines had been chosen to enable operations, such as the coating of nuts with chocolate, to be seen and understood. The visitors were separated from these operations by chest-high perspex screens. The demonstration staff, who had been recruited from the factory, wore white production clothing, and had been trained to interact with visitors. After watching a process (for example, vibrating chocolate into moulds or turning out blocks), visitors were offered samples of chocolate. Overhead, a number of suspended photographs showed the full-scale production equivalent of each of these machines. This section of the tour continued with a number of demonstrations of the production of luxury, handmade chocolates. As before, staff were behind clear screens; they carried out a number of dipping, enrobing (coating) and finishing operations. After being given more free samples and asking questions, the group moved out of the demonstration area and back into the new building. Although there was not a set number of points of interest, visitors could see up to eight different processes in this area.

It was often noticed that some visitors roamed, moving from one guides group to the one ahead, and completed this section in as little as six minutes. By contrast, other visitors took the opportunity to ask many questions, looking at all the points of interest and sampling all the free chocolate. In this case, they and their guide could take up to 17 minutes to get round. No overtaking of guides by the following guides was allowed. Therefore, they needed to adjust the length of their explanations in order to match the speed of their group to that of any preceding group, which could include an unusually slow visitor. Guides noticed that they found it easier to control the coherence and behaviour of their groups when they used the microphones.