Tasty Paella Restaurant (Operations Management)

The business: “Tasty paella”

“Tasty paella” is a 25 years old restaurant, founded by Carlos and specialised in paella, an internationally-known rice dish from Spain.

The restaurant is at the beach in the Mediterranean coast of Tarragona (Spain).

The restaurant has 15 tables with 4 chairs each.

Paella takes around 20 minutes of cooking time and is made with selected ingredients (as seafood or chicken).

In summer week-ends local customers a visitors try to get a table for a delicious lunch at “Tasty paella”.

Key dimension: Time

The goal is to increase paella customers per hour,(to reduce customer flow time during peak hours) because long wait times make customers leave the restaurant and it means to lose revenues.

Performance mesures:

- Customer flow time.

- Waiting time.

- Activity time.

- % of customers leaving the restaurant

The key trade-off associated with this dimension is more variety of rice dishes (valencian paella, seefood paella, black rice…) it means longer flow time.

What would success look like

A vision for an improvement:

The bottle neck is the space for tables, but not the kitchen capability, so are proposed the following improvements during peak hours (13:00 AM – 4:00 PM on Friday through Sunday in the summer season):

- Target customer flow time: from 1 hour to 30 minutes. With take-away service (not more tables are available).

- Target paella making activity time: from 30 minutes to 20 minutes, with precooked ingredients.

- No customer lost due to long queues.

- Variety for rice dishes to atract more clients.

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