Short Case

JIT principles at Little Chef

The Little Chef roadside restaurant chain has over 350 sites located on busy roads around the UK. All restaurants trade from 7.00 am to 10.00 pm, 364 days a year, and offer an all-day menu supplemented by part-day menus and various seasonal promotions. Customers receive a table service of cooked-to-order meals. Target times are 30 minutes for a starter plus main course with an extra 10 minutes for a dessert. To achieve a high standard of customer service, it is necessary to forecast demand as accurately as possible and then to provide for sufficient resources (staff, food, etc.) to meet that demand. In practice, an all-year-round core of regular staff is maintained, supplemented by seasonal staff at peak periods. Staff planning is undertaken at three levels:

·  The quarterly manpower plan. The main input to this plan is the forecast number of customers for each of the 12 weeks of the forecast period.

·  The weekly forecast. The sales forecast from the quarterly plan is updated and broken down into daily sales.

·  The daily plans, which allocate duties between staff.

All materials (food, cleaning items and crockery) are supplied from a single supplier. This helps to ensure that goods are up to a consistent standard. Each restaurant has three deliveries a week, typically Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with orders being placed the same morning. A weekly stock-take provides consumption of each item. The manager uses a locally determined re-order level combined with forecast daily sales to compute material orders. Most foods are delivered and stored frozen. Only salads and cured meats arrive date-coded, usually with four to five days’ shelf-life after delivery. Bread and milk are delivered daily by local suppliers. Stock-holding amounts to about seven days at any one time.

Each restaurant has a ‘menu manual’, which specifies the ingredients, cooking procedures and presentation standards for every item on the menu. Orders are added to the cook’s order pad, including the time when the waitress took the order. Orders are marked once cooking has started, and marked again when cooking has finished. The cooking process is simple. The cooking equipment is also simple – griddles, fryers and pre-programmed microwave ovens. Similarly, a housekeeping board enables, ‘at a glance’, staff to see jobs which need to be done. Standard cleaning products and methods are used throughout the company, and each cleaning task is broken down into ‘how, what, when’ elements. To help ensure that standards are maintained across the network, quality audits are conducted every three months by the local training officer.

Tasks fall into eight categories; there is usually enough flexibility to react on a daily basis to changing needs, however. The categories are:

·  reception/cashier

·  cooking/production

·  beverage production

·  sweet/salad production

·  serving to tables

·  relaying tables

·  washing up

·  cleaning/toilet checks.

Staff are cross-trained for greater flexibility (50 per cent of staff can cook). At quiet times, one person may perform more than one task. Facility flexibility is assisted by moveable tables and chairs so that parties of varying sizes can be accommodated.

Question

1  Although different from a manufacturing company, some of the principles which apply in the Little Chef case are similar to those used in a JIT manufacturer: What are they?