Another screwed up queue

Well, I’ve talked about Quizno’s and I’ve talked about Boston Market’s queuing failures.  Today on the block is Five Guys Burgers.  It’s a new place that just opened up, but I have to say I like their idea.  Their entire menu consists basically of hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries and soda.  There are various toppings for the burgers and dogs, but their menu is pretty basic.   Expensive, but basic.  I think my lunch cost me $9 and change.

Based on the crowd size I observed, I’d say they were doing pretty darn well too.  I entered the store about 11:45, just before the lunch rush.  It was busy, but not packed and the queue at the registers was relatively small.

They’ve got a single queue at the registers with two registers to serve people in a FIFO style.  I think that works pretty well.  Once you’ve ordered, a little slip prints out which is put down on the burger assembly line and follows your burger along with any instructions.  They’ve got about 3 guys working that line.

Right behind them is the burger/dog cooking folks.  There’s 3 people there as well, busily preparing burgers.  What is interesting to me is that the cashiers, who face the entry are responsible for a form of kanban.  They count the groups of people coming in the door and call out the potential demand before anyone orders anything.  In that way, there are enough burgers on the grill to meet the demand without having excess inventory of cooked burgers.  I was impressed with this.  Of course, in a place like McDonalds where the menu selection is much more vast, that probably wouldn’t work.

I do ponder how they know that all the folks coming in the door will order a burger, but it’s probably a reasonable assumption.  Though they offer hot dogs, I didn’t actually see any being consumed except for the one kid with his family.

Just to the right of the burger cooking folks you have a guy who’s job it appears to be to load the deep fryer with fries.  And next to him a guy who unloads the cooked fries, moves them to a holding area and waits for orders to come down the line that need fries.  This part of their queue is totally wrong.

When I ordered I was told that I was number 19.  Moments later, when I heard the guy at the end of the assembly line bellow out “10!”  I knew I was going to get some good information on how the line was flowing.  If it was working perfectly, I’d expect it to be a FIFO (first in first out) queue.  That’s how they’re set up, anyway, with a line of assemblers each doing their job, passing the work down the line, etc.

The thing was, after sitting and waiting a few minutes I started hearing numbers I didn’t expect.  “25!”  “28!”  “27!”  “32!”  Where was my order!?!?  I’m number 19, and they’re calling out numbers in the upper twenties/lower thirties.  My order was simple too – one burger with ketchup and pickles, a regular fries and a bottle of water (which was provided by the cashier when I ordered).  Eventually my number was called.

As I sat there eating my lunch (it was pretty good, actually), I listened to the conversation of the guys sitting next to me.  It turns out that they had each ordered in turn and been assigned numbers 38, 39, and 40.  But, like my experience, 38’s order didn’t come out first.  40’s did.  And that’s when one of them said “oh, you didn’t get fries, did you?”

I looked back over at the assembly line.  It’s a great place to visit for a look at a process because they do everything out in the open.  There’s no back room at all.  Remember the fry guy?  One thing I noticed about him was that there was one of him and 3, maybe 4, burger assemblers.  While burger assembly is somewhat more complicated than packaging fries, the workload distribution may have been wrong.

On the burger line, there was a guy who put down a slip of foil, put down the open bun, added ketchup and mustard as necessary.  The next guy, it appears to me added the “more complicated” condiments like bacon, lettuce and tomato.  I guess you need special training for that…

The third guy added the burger, which was pretty much provided as requested by the burger cookers.  He then wrapped the burger and pushed it to a fourth guy.  A guy, who’s job, so far as I can tell, was to affix yet another order slip to the outside of the paper bag and bag the burger.  The bagged burger was then transferred to another table, in a fairly chaotic manner, to await either delivery to the customer or the addition of fries.

And that’s where all hell broke loose.  See, the fry guy really does have a pretty simple job.  Take fries from the hopper and load them into a container and then put them into the bag.

Problem 1, the fry guy is stuffed into a corner.  He doesn’t have adequate space to organize his work.  Compared to the nice, pull style work going on the assembly line, fry guy had completed bags awaiting fries pushed on him.

Problem 2, because of #1, the fry guy can’t take a bag, process it (add fries if necessary) and move it down the line.  He’s just got a pile of bags, so he’s likely to work on them out of order.  There really wasn’t a logical way to organize the bags so that fry guy could fill them and move then along.  Instead, once filled they piled up waiting for another guy to take them from him.  And because fry guy was stuffed into a corner, he was constantly crossing over with the guy who took the completed orders.  They got in each other’s way.

Problem 3, the containers they have for fries are styrofoam cups!  This poses two issues.  One, super un-eco-friendly!  Not really an issue for the assembly line, but I thought I’d point it out.  Two, they’re too small for the typical order of fries.  When I finally got my bag, other than holding the grease in so that it didn’t soak through my paper bag, the styrofoam cup did nothing.  The fries overflowed the cup, were in the bottom of the bag, were generally everywhere but in the cup.

That problem stems from the cup being too small.  Since the fry guy can’t pre-load the cup and then drop it into the bag, he has to reach into the bag, make space for his cup to be placed down in there and then pour the fries into the cup while in the bag to minimize spillage.  It’s plain silly.  He’s got all this NVA unnecessary motion.

Problem 4, also because the cup is too small, he can’t prepare fries into cups in anticipations of a lull.  Now, I will say that they have very fresh fries so he isn’t going to have much inventory anyway, but if he could get ahead by even one or two cups of fries, I think he’d look a lot less harried.

Once fry guy eventually does his job, there’s YET another person whose job it is to take the paper bag from fry guy, yell out the order number and give it to the customer who walks up.  If fry guy were part of the assembly line, he probably could do that job.

Fry guy is like an afterthought for this place.  They have a really nice assembly line from the register through burger completion, but it has to take a detour if fries are involved.  Guess what, lots of people want fries.  Why isn’t fry guy in the assembly line – just the next guy to pass the bag as it moves towards the goal?

For now, the simple operation allows it work, but it clearly could work better.  My suggestion, if you have a Five Guys around you is to take a visit and see how it works.  Because of the open environment you can see the entire process really easily and learn a lot about how to make common sense improvements.

Screwed up by the queue

I’ve written about Boston Market before as an interesting example of queuing.  Today I was at Quiznos and watched something else interesting to me that I wondered about.  It was early, before noon, by the time I sat down with my lunch.  I had just run out to a local tire store to get a flat repaired – darn my luck.  I had managed to drive over, who knows where, a 2 1/2 inch screw which promptly lodged in the tread of my tire and made a nice sized hole.

But I digress, I was in a bit of a rush when I got to Quiznos because I had used up the vast majority of my lunch break waiting on a tire repair.  So, as I sat there eating I took note of some standard features of fast food joints.  For example, on the wall were posted some nice sandwich-making job aids.  I couldn’t read them clearly from where I was sitting, but they had organized their sandwiches by major type of meat that was on them, so there was a nice picture of a cow and a chicken and a salami.  A salami is an animal, right?

In addition, the store was set up for a standard single queue.  It’s a small store, so the queuing is a bit of a problem.  The queue doesn’t have a lot of room to wind around, but that’s irrelevant to this story.  In fact, since it was before noon, the queue was empty until these two guys walked in.

The first guy, an older gentleman of husky build, with greying hair and a tan Dickies coat on stepped up to the counter.  “Do you have a $5 meatball sub?”

“4.79 for the regular and 5.29 for the large,” the woman behind the counter responded.

“Oh, I see, I see!” replied the man as if he now saw the menus clearly.  But clearly he didn’t see, because he stood there, probably 10 seconds (it felt like a minute or two).  If you’re not a Quiznos frequenter, you wouldn’t know that for the past few months they had been running $5 large subs of all different kinds.  Then, they recently stopped doing it and now offer “everyday values.”  Same subs, $0.29 more expensive for a large. 

Anyway, he continued to stand there and stare, kind of stepping forward and then back away from the counter, like he was uncertain or nervous.  Finally, he started again “do you have meatball subs?”  Which was particularly amusing to me because right on the door that he just walked in was a large sign, in bold letters “NOW SERVING MEATBALL SUBS.”

“Yes, ” the woman behind the counter replied, pointing toward the everyday value subs sign.  The man still looked confused, so she walked closer to the sign and pointed up towards it.  The sign didn’t just say “meatball,” if it serves as any excuse to this ridiculous interaction.  It in fact says “Primo Meatball.”  I wondered for a moment what makes a primo meatball and what the odds are that quiznos is actually serving something that would meet my definition of “primo.”

Finally slightly less confused, the man says “ok, I’ll have a large meatball.”

“Large white or wheat, ” asks the woman.  I’m not sure if it’s a different bread if you ask for a small, so why she added the large qualifier, I don’t know.  That  confused him again.

“Large.”

“White or wheat, ” she repeated.  He stared blankly.  I started thinking he might have suffered a head injury in his line of work.  Still nonplussed, the man continued to stare.  The woman pulled out a loaf of white bread and showed it to him with a look on her face that said “this one?”

“Yes, that one, ” he finally answered.

HOORAY!!!  He had successfully ordered a sandwich, I thought!

“With american cheese, ” he added…. oh good lord!   They proceeded to have an entire conversation, drawing in the other employee behind the counter, about the fact that they did not have american cheese.  He finally, after some debate about his options, opted for mozzarella, which is apparently their standard for a meatball sub anyway.

So, what’s the point of my entire story.  Remember how I started out this story about Quizno’s queuing system… can you imagine what the single queue looked like now?  Queues, if they contain widgets to be processed are one thing, but queues where the contents of the queue have minds (or a lack thereof) of their own is a whole other thing.  For a moment, the chaos of McDonald’s multi line queuing made sense.  If one line is incapacitated by a moron, the others can move forward, and although processing is somewhat crippled, it is not totally brought to a halt.

Quiznos doesn’t really have that luxury.  Not having any pre-made sandwich inventory, the person taking your order also assembles it to the point where it goes into the toaster.  And since it was early, they only had one order-taker/sandwich pre-assembler on hand.  The queue was hopelessly immobile.  Foiled completely by one indecisive person.  The other end of the queue, the guy who takes the toasted sandwich out, adds lettuce and rings you up was empty.  He was bored.  No throughput at all.  For some reason he wasn’t serving the clogged end of the queue.

I think Quiznos and others who would employ this model need a timer of some form and a mechanism to deal with troublemakers in the queue.  For some reason, Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi comes to mind.  “No sandwich for you!”  Hey, it may be harsh but at least service to the rest of the more compliant people in the queue is vastly improved.  I’ll throw this out there, since I am not a queuing expert.  How should such a morass be handled?

Boston Market fails to select the right CTQ

Today I went to Boston Market for lunch.  Well, I tried to go to Boston Market, but I gave up.  Actually, on the times I succeed on going I like their food compared to most other fast food garbage choices I have.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still eat fast food.  In fact, I resigned myself to McDonalds, which I wasn’t really in the mood for, but it’s right nearby.

See, I stepped into Boston Market, fairly hungry, but not so desperate as to have chosen the company cafeteria for lunch.  Yes, I know it’d be far more economical to either eat at the cafeteria or to bring my lunch, but I like my lunch break to be outside the office.  It’s basically non negotiable for me.

There was a line, like there is most days.  Boston Market employs a single queue service line, which is different from McDonalds.  McDonalds, and most fast food places, use multiple lines and you can choose the fastest line.  Also different is Boston Market uses a batch queue for food service while McDonald’s is more of a single piece flow.  See, when you go into McDonald’s, primarily the person behind the register takes and fills your order.  They complete the entire transaction, from taking your order to getting the food onto your tray.  Behind the scenes they have a bit of a batch processing too, pumping out a few hamburgers, cheeseburgers, etc, but not many more than they can readily use.  It’s sort of an interesting hybrid.

By comparison, Boston Market is entirely batch based.  The person takes your order and places your selections of sides onto the plate.  They then hand that tray off to the carver, a single guy who is responsible for carving and placing the choice of main dish onto your plate.  He then queues up filled plates which are picked up by the cashier who asks you if you want a drink with that and totals your order.

And of course, with this batch process, there’s lots of hand-offs compared to the McDonald’s model where there are essentially none.  Add to that the confusion that each order is communicated verbally and the carver has to remember what goes on each plate, leading to some out of order fulfillment and some extra communication back and forth on what was needed where.

On most days, though woefully inefficient, it doesn’t matter all that much to me.  Because volumes are relatively low, even a minor backup at the carving station doesn’t foul up the works (pardon the chicken pun).  But today was different.  See, someone had come in with a large order – maybe 8 or 10 different entrees all with the necessary sides.  I admit, I came in after this chaos had started, so I can only imagine how long some of the people in front of me had been waiting.

Batch processing seems to make sense, since the carver only has one job – carve up chickens.  But in fact, all his work is not the same, since some people want a half chicken and others want a 1/4 dark and other a 1/4 light meat.  The order taker/side dish person is pretty efficient, but that creates a queue in front of the carver.  Of course, with 8 to 10 different things to remember all at once, the carver gets confused with what plate gets what.  And suddenly nobody’s order is getting filled.  See, once the carver couldn’t handle the volume, the order taker ground to a halt.  There was no more place on the carving station to put more plates, so the line of customers began to build.  At least, there were no more places that wouldn’t result in precariously perched (pardon the chicken pun again) plates.  The cashier was also at a standstill.  Since the carver was confused as to what went on which plate, no orders were getting completed.

I watched in frustration for about 5 minutes from the place where I had been standing ever since I walked in the door.  I hadn’t moved a step, not one, because the queue was not moving.  And the customer queue wasn’t moving because the carving queue wasn’t moving and the whole thing shut down.

I didn’t actually leave the restaurant because of their queue failure directly.  I mean, actually, it makes good fodder for my blog.  I left because I lost patience with standing in one place and was unwilling to wait 5 minutes and make no progress. 

See, the batch queuing might be better if the carver could remember the orders, but it probably would still be unacceptable.  I doubt Boston Market actually has a measurement system for their restaurant delivery process, but if they did, I suspect their big performance measure would be something like order completion time.  In my mind, this would be something like the time from when the customer’s order is taken until when the customer departs the register.  This would be an OK measurement, but isn’t actually aligned with my customer experience.

My satisfaction is measured from the amount of time I get in line until I reach the register.  Specifically, I’ll leave the queue if I don’t perceive the queue is moving.  I actually don’t mind if it’s 5 or 7 or maybe even 10 minutes to wait, but I want to make progress.  Having seen a total standstill, I assumed my wait would be too long and therefore I got out of line.  In fact, they might have cleared that customer’s big order in just a minute or two more, but in the meantime I had already given up because I was still waiting.

Believe it or not, this is a well known problem at retail establishments.  The single queue for customers is in theory actually faster since it serves everyone equally.  There’s no more guessing about which is the right line to get into.  In fact, the multiple queues at McDonald’s annoy me because I find myself gauging which line I think will be best.  I’m always on the lookout for old people or the mom’s club who came with 10 children in tow.  They are a disaster for the line you are standing in.  So, up to the point where you reach the front of the customer queue, a single queue is best.  Beyond that, your actual servicing should be multiple queues.  Now that I’m being served, I want to be taken care of.  And if I’m the customer behind you, I don’t want to wait around for your huge order just so that I can give mine.

Could you imagine being at Best Buy around Christmas (well, maybe not this Christmas what with the dismal sales forecasts) and having your cashier go help another cashier get someone else’s order complete rather than checking you out?  That’s essentially what’s happening at Boston Market.  Everyone focuses on getting that first customer complete before going onto another.  And frankly, that just makes me impatient.

What’s the takeaway?  Well, if you’re a Boston Market executive vice president reading this, hopefully you’ll change your process to have each order taker completely fulfill the order of just one customer instead of having these crazy queues.  Yes, that means each order taker puts on the side dishes, carves the necessary chicken, adds the cornbread (it’s not that good, maybe you could keep it warm and serve it with butter as well), and then maybe hands off a completed order to the cashier.  It’d probably be better if the cashier just did it all.  I’d be most appreciative if you could fix that.

If you’re anyone else, the takeaway is, if your factory (whatever you’re producing) interfaces directly with customers, a single piece flow might be more than just a good manufacturing idea.  It might feed directly into what satisfies your customers – a sense of progress.