Which decisions in this story could be considered unstructured problems? Structured problems?

4-23How did Panera Bread use the decision-making process (see Exhibit 4-1) to tackle its "mosh pit" problem?

4-24Decision making starts with a problem and ends with a solution to solve the problem. Did that happen in this story? Explain your answer.

4-25 Creativity and design thinking are two contemporary decision-making issues that we introduced in the chapter. Were creativity and design thinking illustrated in this story? Discuss.

Topic: Decision-making process, creative problem solving

Panera Bread Company is an American chain of bakery-caf fast casual restaurants based out of St. Louis, Missouri. Founded more than 35 years ago, Panera is now an enterprise with more than 2,000 bakery-cafs, 100,000 associates, and annual systemwide sales of more than $5 billion.⁶⁸ As an extremely popular destination for hungry customers, Panera had a problem: lines and lines of customers. A bottleneck at the registers for placing orders. Then, another bottleneck of customers waiting to pick up their food. Panera Bread's CEO, Ron Shaich, called it a "'mosh pit' of people waiting for their food."⁶⁹ The average customer wait time...8 minutes. Shaich knew that something had to be done about their service model. He knew that online ordering was the solution, but getting that process done right would take more than six years...and lots of decisions! Enter Panera 2.0.

What is Panera 2.0? It's a technology-driven initiative that has been tested and retested before being rolled out throughout the company. At a prototype store in Braintree, Massachusetts, Shaich and his team found, among other things, that they couldn't just "solve" the order-taking process, the system had to seamlessly flow through to the kitchen processes, as well. It had to address bottlenecks there and ensure that order errors were minimized. Blaine Hurst, Panera's president said, "It was literally hundreds of these little things that we did."⁷⁰

Problem: