3P in Restaurants

Yestarday I watched in TV an episode of Magda Gesler’s series about transforming not prospering well restaurants into good prospering one. As I watched it minute by minute I realized that this business is not so much different than f.e. production (products don’t matter). Because:

1. People – “It’s all about people” – this is what lean culture stands for. Here, organisational structure was exactely the same as in production … and with similar problems. On the one side we have a restaurant’s owner, not really convinced to changes, and a “small” dictator, I would say. On the other side, there is a great team merged by theirs disinclination to the boss. Task for the person from outside was to find the root cause (f.e. salary wasn’t paid on time) and biuld a new communication path between this 2 levels.

2. Process. We could observe no heijunka (leveled production – in this case prepared dishes and in result people were waiting for the food over 45 minutes), no standard work (waiters didn’t know what tables they are responsible for and in fact they forgot to serve some customers!), no 5S and visual management (papers with names of dishes were flying all over the kitchen) … From the lean point of view there was a lot of work to do with above tools to improve efficiency.

3. Purpose. This is what Magda did at the beginning. She changed completely the way restaurant should be organised – she set up new idea to run this business. The restaurant started to serve a specialised dishes and not selling all, what they can imagine having only 2 cooks. They changed also the inside outlook adding f.e. a fireplace.

All above 3P it’s not something new. Japanese companies have been doing it for 30 years at least. However what is really interesting (and real!) is fact that we can apply this rules to all businesses in the world. And this is some kind of argument/example for couple of change mindset blockers.

Advertisement