Takeshi Shimmura

Real-Time Process Management System in a Restaurant by Sharing Food Order Information

In a full-service restaurant, it is crucial to share order information among staff in the dining room and kitchen. This paper introduces a real-time process management system for restaurants using an advanced point-of-sale (POS) system by which staff can share order information in real time. In this system, kitchen staff can check all customer orders by the dish that was ordered and the elapsed time of each order. Moreover, dining hall workers can grasp their customer situation with a monitor. By introducing this system to a restaurant, we confirmed that it can make preparation processes more efficient and reduce customers’ claims.

Facility Layout Planning of Central Kitchen in Food Service Industry: Application to the Real-Scale Problem

Central kitchen is a food producing factory to improve productivity in the food-service industry, to pursue scale-merit by aggregation of tasks in multiple stores into one place. However, the central kitchen is still labor intensive production environment because of trade-off between quality and quantity of products, so that the handicraft of skilled workers cannot be eliminated. In addition, there are many part-time workers as well as full-time ones, as a result, operators can be also uncertain factors. Furthermore, customer demand forecast is also difficult according to not only susceptible to weather and seasonal variation but also influence from irregular events held around the restaurant. Due to such characteristics of the food service industry, it is also difficult to plan proper facility layout of the central kitchen to achieve both optimality and adaptability to the complexity. In this study, a new facility layout planning method of the central kitchen is proposed, where not only optimization but simulation is also adopted; flow of workers as well as products can be considered simultaneously. Computer experiments in which the proposed method is applied to the real-scale problem are conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Employee Satisfaction Analysis in Food Service Industry – Resultant of Questionnaire to the Restaurant Staff

This study analyzed employee satisfaction in the food service industry by looking at the results of a questionnaire delivered to the restaurant staff. Question items were divided into seven question categories: work environment, work efficiency and service quality, relationship with bosses, rules, education system, attitude and motivation toward work, and interest in multi-skills development. A Japanese restaurant chain located in Japan is selected as an analysis target. Satisfaction structures and the differences among the attributes of work position, employee pattern, age group, and length of continuous employment were analyzed with correlation analysis and covariance structure analysis.

Enhancing Kitchen Layout and Training to Improve Management and Employee Satisfaction at a Multiproduct Japanese Cuisine Restaurant

This study was conducted to improve both management and employee satisfaction (ES) at multiproduct Japanese cuisine restaurants. Conventionally, restaurant industry research has emphasized the improvement of management satisfaction. However, restaurants must improve employee satisfaction because it deeply affects labor productivity and food quality. For this study, the kitchen layout was remodelled, a cell production system was introduced to a multiproduct Japanese cuisine restaurant, and the kitchen was designed using a kitchen simulator to enhance cooking time and to improve the working environment of staff members. Salary and promotion systems were changed to encourage staff members to adopt the cell production system. Cooking times were measured (existing layout, immediately after remodel, and 2 months after remodel) as KPI to confirm the efficacy of the redesigned kitchen. Questionnaires were administered to confirm employee satisfaction (as same times as measuring cooking speed). Results show that (1) remodelling of the kitchen layout using a kitchen simulator is useful to enhance the food preparation rate of a multiproduct Japanese cuisine restaurant, (2) the rate worsens immediately after remodelling because staff members are not accustomed with new kitchen layout, and (3) employees estimate that the remodelled kitchen layout is better than the existing kitchen and that the new salary system is reasonable for them, but they do not want to advance their skills because of their age and difficulty (some are already multiskilled workers).

A Combinatorial Auction-Based Approach to Staff Shift Scheduling in Restaurant Business

This study focuses on improving the productivity of restaurant business. The productivity of restaurant business in Japan is lower than other service industries because the approach to improve the productivity has depended on experience and intuition by human workers in the service field. This study tries to adopt engineering/science approaches to staff shift scheduling in restaurant business; combinatorial auction is applied. Combinatorial auction-based staff scheduling is a negotiation-based approach between workers and a manager to reach an agreement in the multi-objective optimization problem; workers want to work as much as they can. On the other hand, the manager tries to reduce the number of workers if the service level can be kept with high enough to fulfil the customer’s requirements. Resulting from the negotiation, the proposed method tries to find the staff shift schedule to realize maximization of service satisfaction composed by customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and manager satisfaction. The effectiveness of the proposed method is discussed using the results of computer experiments using real data obtained from the Japanese cuisine restaurant.

Energy Consumption in the Food Service Industry: A Conceptual Model of Energy Management Considering Service Properties

This paper examines features of energy consumption in the food service industry considering the possible effects caused by properties of service such as intangibility, heterogeneity, perishability, and simultaneity. This study examines four food service businesses: restaurant services with a cook-chill system, restaurant services with a cook-serve system, delivery of prepared food services, and home-meal replacements. The service provision process is analysed along with the energy input for each process. Subsequently, a conceptual model of energy demand management considering the simultaneity of service is proposed as a first step goal to enhance energy demand management.