FANTASTIC PASTRY SHOP CASE STUDY

Introduction about Fantastic Pastry Shop:

Fantastic Pastry Shop is a traditional pastry shop established in 1999. It is a small shop owned by two persons. One of them was responsible for buying goods and bringing them to the shop two times a day (every morning and late afternoon). The other one is managing the shop activities and organizing shifts for employees. They work 24/7 and have three shifts. They employ well-experienced employees in each shift. The shop has three chefs for making the dough and sauce, three well-trained employees for preparing and putting the ingredients, and three well-trained employees for cooking the pastry and controlling the oven heat. The owners work on this shop and have other employees to help them.

The order process in Fantastic Pastry Shop:

The process starts by welcoming the customer and giving them the menu. The customer looks into the menu then places their order. The cashier writes down the order on a separate paper for each customer, calculates the prices, and then asks the customer to pay (4 minutes). After getting the payment, the cashier handed the paper of each order to the second employee. The next employee then starts to prepare the dough based on the order (the shop has two bases of dough: white flour dough and brown wholemeal flour dough) (4 minutes). The next employee is responsible for filling the pastry with the ingredients based on each customer’s order (2 minutes). The next employee takes the pastry, puts it into the oven until it is ready, and then gets it back (2 minutes for white flour base and 4 minutes for brown wholemeal flour base). The last employee cut the pastry and packages it then hands it to the customer (2 minutes).

The current situation of Fantastic Pastry Shop:

The shop starts to get a lot of orders that are over its capacity due to its reputation. It usually gets around 20 orders from persons coming to their shop in each hour. Each order – on average – includes 3-5 pastries of different bases and ingredients. However, the shop lost a couple of its experienced employees responsible for preparing and cooking pastries.

The Issues in Fantastic Pastry Shop:

The Fantastic Pastry Shop was very successful and had many customers and significant revenue. However, the shop starts to lose many of its loyal customers and receives a considerable number of complaints. The managers started to investigate the complaints they received. They also contacted their loyal customers to understand the different issues more clearly. After this deep investigation, they categorized the issues into the following categories:

• Some of the pastry’s bases and ingredients are unavailable in the early afternoon or late night.
• The waiting time becomes unacceptable to customers.
• The quantity of ingredients is not always the same which affecting the taste of the pastry.
• The brown wholemeal flour base of pastries is sometimes undercooked.
• The customers sometimes get some of their pastries cold.
• The customers sometimes get the wrong order.

The requirements to solve Fantastic Pastry Shop process issue:

Besides the available information, you are expected and allowed to make assumptions, if you need, to improve the process and solve the issue of the Fantastic Pastry Shop.

You are requested to solve the issue of the Fantastic Pastry Shop and improve its process and performance by answering the following questions.

solve this question

Explain the main Input, Process Activities, and Output of the Fantastic Pastry Shop Process. Then, calculate the current cycle time of the process? Also, calculate the throughput for this process in 1 hour? Further, find out the bottleneck activities?