Komala's Restaurant Essay

Submitted By Soumya-Saha
Words: 753
Pages: 4

Komala’s has been successful in overcoming the challenges (Appendix 1) in the Singaporean fast food industry by implementing a new concept of service whose ingredients are serving food fast at all times by precooking of side dishes & using disposables for packaging, operating with minimum number of employees by implementing self service and keeping the owners free from cash management to be available for other business activities by using modern IT systems. The service quality at Komala’s can be defined by Tangibles, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance & Empathy (Appendix 2). Komala’s operations consists of frontend and backend operations (Appendix 3). Frontend operations consists of ordering food at the 1st counter & collecting food at the 2nd counter & backend operations consists of kitchen operations, housekeeping & part servery. The potential fail points are the wait times at the ordering counter & the servery counter and the wait time to get the seat. The ability of the kitchen to cook the main dish along with the three fail-points determines the capacity of Komala’s to serve more customers. Komala’s operations are similar to fast food chains like Mc Donald’s which have an aim of serving customers at fast pace, while ensuring low prices & high service quality. Though it gets a small profit from each order but it makes money on the volume of orders processed by serving as many people as possible and minimises its cost of providing services by self service. It is different from the traditional Indian restaurants as it serves a lot more varieties of Indian food & has a look and feel of a trendy American fast food joint. Precooking of side dishes & sauces, use of plates and crockery made of disposable plastic with a stainless steel look for serving food and absence of waiters gives Komala’s a different identity than the traditional Indian Restaurants.
The main problems that Komala’s faces are the bottlenecks caused during peak hours caused by long queues at the cashier & severy counters & the increased waiting time for customers to get a vacant seat during peak hours which increase the turnaround time and decreases the capacity of Komala’s. The efficiency of the operations can be measured (KPI) by the minimum number of customers Komala’s loses to other restaurants during peak hours. The management needs to process the queues faster at the cashier, servery and seating during peak hours. One alternative is to introduce touch screen computers for customers to know about the meal offerings and place their orders while on the queue at the cash counter for payment. This will speed up the order generation process & give a more ‘interactive’ & ‘reliable’ service to customers to choose their own meals & remove any inefficiency caused due to miscommunication between customers & staff while taking orders. Another alternative is to utilize the non peak hours to precook the most commonly ordered main dishes and decrease the kitchen time during peak hours to improve the efficiency of servery counter. My solution is to implement both of these