Bents Garden Restaurant

As soon as you walk into Bents Garden Centre, situated in Cheshire, you realise that this is no ordinary centre. Britain’s Best Garden Retailer at the 2007 Britain’s Best Retailer Awards, the Fresh Approach Restaurant is exactly how it is described and the quality of the staff, the environment and the food they produce would rival a City-based restaurant.

Managing Director, Matthew Bent, wanted to further push the boundaries on the restaurants enviable position. With this in mind the application of Lean to the restaurant processes to both improve the quality of service as well as reduce down queuing time was seen as way forward.

Workshop Objectives

The objectives were to improve the front of house process for customers so as to increase the levels of service provided and reduce down queuing times. This would in turn lead to increased sales by increasing throughput as well as improving customer satisfaction.

Also, to improve the back of house processes for associates so as to make the tasks as easy as possible for them and ensuring everything they need to deal with the customer’s order is at hand every time. This again will help reduce down customer queuing time.

Workshop Format

The 4-day workshop was completed with 15 colleagues from the restaurant ranging from the Head Chef, front of house service through to the Restaurant Manager. By involving as many associates as possible it was possible to get a wide range of views as to what the problems were and immediate buy-in to any proposed solutions.

Initially the ‘customer’ journey was videoed through the restaurant buying various combinations e.g. soup and a sandwich, latte and a cake, etc. We also carried out Activity Samples on the back of house processes to see where associate time was lost in servicing customers.

The Problem

• Bottlenecks were identified at the hot drinks counters which resulted in customers queuing
• The menu positions and counter signage was such that it caused customers to double back on themselves through the process adding to the congestion
• Colleagues having to walk away from the serving counter to find the utensils and food ingredients they needed to serve customers. These little delays in service compounded to cause the queues at the service counters.
• The layout of the salad counters caused delays with customers having to request all the food items they want from the salad bar as opposed to serving themselves
• At the hot food counter the position of the main courses were after the vegetables causing customers to walk back up the queues to choose their vegetables after first of all choosing their main course protein.

The Solutions

• Train all the Restaurant Colleagues to decide on and then maintain the optimum layout of the counters so that no time was lost in picking up the food ingredients and utensils. In French restaurants the phrase ‘en plast’ which translates to ‘be prepared’ is often used. In Lean we talk about Workplace Organisation with the key aspect of making sure that everything is put back into its optimum location at the end of each working day
• Changing menu position so that customers can decide what food they want as early in the process as possible and then re-positioning the counter signage so that they can see where they need to go before entering the restaurant. In Service Design we often talk about ‘Script and Role’ whereby both are clearly defined for the customer through clear signage. Getting this wrong will lead to customer dissatisfaction
• Putting in place Problem Resolution boards and meetings giving colleagues the opportunity to log down problems they have encountered during service. A weekly meeting chaired by the manager would then look to solve these problems so that they never occurred again.
• The introduction of a ‘Runner’ to routinely travel around the counters ensuring the food stocks was topped up to their optimum levels.
• The introduction of visual minimum and maximum levels prevented stocks outs or over-stocking and help indicated were re-stocking needed to take place. In Lean will call this ‘Kanban’ or signal to re-stock.
• The proposed re-layout of the salad bar to enable customers to help themselves and choose what salad they required. As a general rule the more you can include the customers in the service process the more satisfied they feel as well as improving productivity of the Restaurant Colleagues.
• The re-layout of the hot food counter so that the proteins were the first thing encountered before moving on to choose the vegetables. This encouraged the customers to move down the counter preventing bottlenecks

Benefits

The identified improvements will potentially reduce down time for customers to move through the service area of the counter by 70%!! Not only will this improve sales by increasing customer throughput but will also improve customer satisfication by reducing down queue sizes, especially at peak periods.

Comments

Andrew Borurne, Restaurant Manager “To have a fresh pair of eyes looking at our business, has been of great value to both our customer and colleagues, helping us to work efficiently and effectively to improve our customers journey throughout the Fresh Approach Restaurant, in Surprising and Delighting which is at the heart of our mission statement for the business.”

Neil Fedden, HTA Lean Consultant, “Bents have an incredible eye for detail for the quality of the food served and the aesthetics of restaurant. All we really needed them to show them how to apply the same level of detail to their processes. Lean is the attention to process detail.”