Reengineer restaurant set-meal design process

Abstract

A chain restaurant's meal planning and design process include evaluating the ingredient specifications creating tastes and appearance, and finally receiving the approval of the set-meal by headquarters. The data sharing during the meal creation cycle, controlling especially information flows between branches and headquarters are inefficient. This research overcomes the product information management (PIM) issue by reengineering the meal creation process using modular product design and system engineering. A product data system provides a platform for the organizing, saving and controlling of information related to the product design, production and lifecycle management. Managing the product data is a complicated process, particularly in a competitive high-end restaurant chain. Using the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) concept, we design and develop a decision support system called the Integrated Meal Planning (IMP) system, to enhance the efficiency of the meal planning and designing process. The conventional (as-is) and newly defined IMP (to-be) operations between headquarter and branches are carefully studied to demonstrate the benefits of IMP. In the first phase of the study, the current data exchanging model are derived. In the second phase, the to-be PLM model and process are derived. To evaluate the performance of the proposed models, a case study of a high-end Japanese restaurant chain used to demonstrate the to-be IMP solution.