Thanks, to proceed further, I need clarity on the following points:
- Who are we? Are we a restaurant brand or a service provider to a restaurant?
- Why do we need this product?
- What is the current cooking process?
- What is the objective for building this product? Is it to reduce TAT or increase retention?
- Is it to be sped for dine-in orders or online orders?
- Are we looking for a digital product or a physical product?
So the answer to these questions would be, we are an existing north indian restaurant chain established across India, and we have observed that we take 0.5 times more than our competitors for catering a meal to our diners. We are looking for a digital product that helps us cater the meal at par with our competitors.
Let us assume that the current journey looks like this: Customer enters the restaurant - browses the menu - places the order to a waiter - waiter notes it down on a paper/ order memo - the order memo is shared with the head chef - head chef shares it with the chef taking care of that specific cuisine - orders gets cooked as per the recipe - food is plated - food is served.
As we have certain clarity on these questions, i will now quickly summarise my approach to work with this problem, i’ll first try to identify the users and prioritise them, then we will look into their problem statements and prioritise the one where we can make maximum impact and then we will build solutions for the prioritised problem statement.
So probable users would be:
- Diners: Diners are users who visit a restaurant to eat and are the major stakeholder in terms of defining which dish will be ordered.
- Waiters: waiters are the users who ensure that a diners requirement is carefully captured and communicated to the chefs/.
- Chefs: chefs are the users who ensure that the right meal with correct ingredients and taste is cooked to delight their diners.
- Managers: managers are the users who ensure that the diner is duly and correctly billed.
User Prioritisation parameters:
- Impact on cooking process
- Cooking process TAT
- Customer Delight
On the basis of the above 3 parameters and our core objective, I will prioritise chefs as our users.
As we have narrowed down to “CHEFS” as our user, we will look into the pain points of chefs:
- Being a chef, i am not able to get the right order detail
- Being a chef, i am not able to do right ingredient planning for rush hours
- Being a chef, i am not able to add correct ingredients for cooking a meal
Now, we will prioritise the pain-point on the basis of following parameters:
- Impact on cooking process
- User Delight
- Customer Delight
Based on these parameters and keeping in mind the objective of this problem statement, we will build a solution for, “Being a chef, I am not able to do the right ingredient planning for rush hours.”
Now, we will look into some of the solutions:
- Smart Ingredient Planner: a smart physical container or device installed at the chefs slabs that helps them use correct ingredients as well as observe quantity usage of an ingredient per meal. This will further help them ensure ample quantities of correct ingredients are stored at their disposal.
- Order History: a smart device installed at the chef slabs that gives them a historic data of their meals sold on a daily & hourly basis. This will help them plan for human resources or ingredients in advance.
On the basis of following parameters, we will prioritise a solution:
- User Impact
- Customer Delight
- Ease of Development
- Time
Based on these parameters, I will prioritise solution 1 i.e., “Smart Ingredient Planner” for this problem statement. And to measure the metric, we will measure the following metric:
- Dispense time of an ingredient at chef’s slab
- Total TAT from the time order is taken to the time order is served