Sunset Grill

Executive Summary

Sunset Grill was founded in 1985 to serve mainly breakfast to customers during all hours of the day. Sunset Grill’s business model have shown to work in most of their franchises, however; the owner at Sunset at Blue, one of the franchises located in Mountain Blue, Ontario noticed that although the franchise was able to break even within their first year, there were big opportunities to improve operation and increase revenue. Jason Melhuish, owner of the Sunset at Blue identified several factors that were contributing to not making as much money as the establishment could make, especially bottlenecks, lack of utilizing maximum capacity and poor training. Sunset at Blue knew that they needed to improve their operation by reducing customer waiting time which in turn may increase business profitability. Process flow, throughput time, turnaround time, needed to be thoroughly evaluated to improve customer service, maintain costs low and grow revenue. Several options were considered and evaluated, but after analyzing the positive vs the negatve impact of each, we recommend that Sunset at Blue focus on reducing the bottleneck by, cross training their employees to maximize their capabilities, make better use of the facility layout to increase their capacity and use marketing strategies to drive customers into different hours of the day that are not the rush hour.

Background

Sunset Grill started to operate in 1985 as an all-day breakfast restaurant. Their philosophy was to have a restaurant with a friendly atmosphere and delicious food and with that accomplished, the customers would follow. They were able to keep labor cost below industry average by only operating one shift per day. Sunset Grill became a success and owners decided to franchise the concept. All the dishes in the menu were cooked freshly and scrutinized to make sure they were as healthy as possible. In the meantime, the prices of the all-day breakfast were maintained low, which were most...