Observation Report --- Order Behaviors of Restaurant Guests

Lihu Feng

Nicely completed and as you mention not enough data to make decisions, hence to need for serious planning. The importance of this exercise is to familiarize you with the process and the issues you must be careful about. Thinking about your major idea for change, you need to realize that most restaurant of any quality and reputation typically operate with the minimal wait staff already. As you move to different cultures, you could see more wait staff as the cost for that staff is much lower. Even in high-end establishments, you will likely see minimal staff. The cost of staff is a very difficult task to study. For example many restaurants pay below the minimum wage as they reduce cost based on tip average. Again, too many restaurants function very differently. For example, in some they maintain a very sizable wait staff that only works when called. Others, control staff by the time of day and change that during holidays, etc, very often. So, bottom-line is studies of the topics require significant thought. Dr Jake 94/100

Observation Report --- Order Behaviors of Restaurant Guests

Introduction

Personalization is an ideal approach for restaurant to take to make a big leap in service innovation. However, due to the limitation of labor cost and sophisticated process, to operate a restaurant which can personalize everything can be hard to realize.

I am thinking a way to optimize the current restaurant operating model so that applying personalization in restaurants can be easier. Considering the exist problems, the major one is labor, both labor cost and labor usage. So an idea comes to my mind. Why don’t we cut the labor on servers and add labor to the kitchen? To achieve this goal, I am thinking a self-service ordering system which can be operated on a tablet. The system can help the guests complete the customization of their orders and transfer the placed order to the kitchen in seconds. In order to decrease the sophistication and inconvenience and to increase efficiency, I think a well optimized ordering system is the key. So I am going to conduct an observation on guests’ ordering behaviors, including the way they read the menu and the way they interact with the servers.

This observation is an attempt to see whether there is a possibility to realize cutting labor in servers in order to add more labor to the kitchen. Also, I want to check the necessity to do so.

Observation

I made my observations in three different sites. I planned to get three observations each site, so, in total 9 observations. However, I get only two observations at one site during my stay. As a result, I get 8 observations in total. To ensure the diversity of the data, I went to choose different time of the day and different day of the week to conduct the observations. I decided to use one table as an observation because the ordering progress is typically finished table by table. However, one of the observations each site is the table I sit in so that I can have a closer look to the details. To ensure the objectiveness, I did not tell my friends with me that I was conducting an observation of their behaviors.