Bottlenecks in a Process

Apply the Learning Curve Theory

Yvonne Faulk

OPS 571

Richard Williams

June 6, 2011

Apply the Learning Curve Theory

Mario’s Pizzeria has been open since 1950. It is a family owned business who strives in serving the best pizzas with the freshest ingredients. Its location has been very beneficial for the company which has its home in an indoor mall in Palm Springs, FL. Because this is a family owned business, Mario has given me, his only granddaughter, the task of running the restaurant. At its current state the average wait time is between seven to nine minutes with a customer arrival ration of 60:40. Mario is worried that the average wait time is cutting very close to the upper tolerance limit. I have a huge task on my hands and by the end of the two month period; I hope to have the full support of my grandfather to be able to run the store on my own. My main goals are to consider an alternative to the current process and to come up with a way to apply the learning curve concepts to test the alternative process against the existing process.

Once the customer enters the restaurant, the process begins and the time starts to run. After the customer enters the store, the customer is seated, their orders are taken, the orders are then processed and delivered to the table. Currently there are only 14 tables of four, a wait staff of four and a kitchen staff of two which has caused the rate time to range from 11 to 12 minutes which is a lot higher than the initial average of 7 to 9 minutes. “A learning curve is defined as a line displaying the relationship between unit production time and the cumulative number of units produced” (Chase, et.al, 2005 p. 135). With the current process, 2 groups of 2 and 37 groups of 4 walked out of the restaurant because of the high turnaround time which made the company as a whole lose $1,155.00 in sales.

To help reduce the amount of lost sales, I decided to change the learning curve around a little bit to hopefully reduce the...