Operations Analysis of Small Scale Restraunt in Calicut

LOVELY DHABA

Operations Management

Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode

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Executive Summary

Lovely Dhaba is a small sized restaurant located in Calicut, Kerala, owned by a Sindhi family for the past fifteen years. The pure vegetarian restaurant primarily serves North Indian cuisine and is positioned as a low cost, high quality restaurant. Being a small organization, Lovely Dhaba follows a simple hierarchical structure. The owner, Mr. Purshotam, takes majority of the decisions pertaining to operations and finances. Lovely Dhaba has 6 helpers, out of which, 3 are cooks and the other 3 are cleaners and waiters. The owner and his wife are responsible for procurement of raw material. Raw material is procured just when the inventory level falls below the safety stock. The owner of the restaurant has the sole responsibility of ensuring quality at four levels: raw material, end products, cleanliness and billing. The staff at Lovely is hired from a local contractor. Majority of the work at Lovely is manual. Right from preparing the meal to processing the bill, there is hardly any automation. Because of the simple structure, job specialization is low. However, there is ample opportunity for horizontal job specialization. Analysis of operations also revealed existing practice of poka-yoke for error avoidance and high customer satisfaction. The report provides a detailed analysis of the facility layout, service blue-print and learning curve of back-end activities. A careful scrutiny of operations revealed that the order winners for Lovely Dhaba are homely North Indian food, subsidized food, high quality food, and immense focus on customer relations. Lovely Dhaba faces challenges with respect to popularity and awareness, layout, labour, inventory management, record keeping, and waiting time.

To address these challenges, the report provides recommendations for operational success of Lovely Dhaba. Suggestions to the service blue-print basically call for introduction of a waiting list and changes in the billing system. A network planning model for an illustrative back-end process has been suggested for greater efficiency. Awareness could be increased by leveraging on social networking sites, advertisements in college magazines and posters, and promotion of services such as ¡¥Dial-A-Meal¡¦. Suggestions have also been made to strengthen the technological capability strategy for better record keeping, job design and inventory management .

LOVELY DHABA

Operations Management

c Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode

Page 3

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ...............................................................................................................................1

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