Steps to prepare a group report:

1) Please thoroughly study/review pages 111 to 114 from the textbook for this group report. Each student is expected to bring one example from real-life and/or past workplaces or your own observations of a situation or a process, which you find to be similar to one of the cases described on pages 112-113 and which could be improved, or was improved through one of the proposed solutions on those pages, as per your observations.

2) Each student must document his/her/their example in 1-2 pages max (and then the group must work together to prepare a group report with proper formatting). For each example, please describe the process at a high level (and/or in more detail if available), and then articulate the situation that needed improvement. Afterwards, explain which one of the cases from those noted on pages 112-113 could be applicable to that process in that situation and could have made a difference toward improving that process/situation. If you observed and/or participated in some improvement activities for that process/situation as well, please describe what activities or solutions were applied, and mention the case from pages 112-113 to which your observed improvement was relevant.

In summary:

Each group is needed to submit one written report which must include 1 example provided by each student in your group. Each example must describe certain things, and must follow a structure that explains and covers the following aspects:

1) What is the situation or your observed scenario/process (describe it at a high level but provide more details such as process metrics, observed issues, challenges, etc.)

2) Which of the cases from pages 112-113 applies or was applicable to enable some improvements in that scenario/example that you have provided. Explain how applying that solution (from pages 112-113) improved, could improve, or could have improved that process, and provide your observation and high-level analysis. Here is an example from a past report submitted by the students:

Example: "I am an international student and work at Tim Hortons. A year ago, the restaurant was only serving through the skip-the-dishes and/or directly to the customers, and it was not getting much income. Accordingly, this was an issue of External bottlenecks, which means that while the staff had the capacity to serve more people, there was not enough demand coming their way. After a while, Tim Hortons started accepting orders from Uber eats and Doordash delivery, as a result of which, the restaurant is getting higher profits which also helps maintain the market position and address the issue of external bottlenecks (NOTE: if you have some ballpark numbers to add here, it will be great to give the audience a sense of how much improvement was obtained in throughput as a result). However, a downside of these increased delivery channels was an increased wait time for the customers and an increased burden on employees as they needed to do more hard work (and obviously this caused an internal bottleneck to emerge). Tim Hortons could address this issue through the following actions, which is an example of spiral improvements and shifting the bottlenecks as per what is described on page 113:

- Increase the number of resources

- Look for ways to speed up the processes

- Provide incentives to encourage happy hours and outside the peak hours ordering to level the capacity and move work off the bottlenecks"