Reducing service time at a busy fast food restaurant on campus

As part of an undergraduate engineering class project, a Tim Hortons restaurant on the University of Michigan campus was simulated to improve its efficiency. Using the standard simulation study steps, several service scenarios were modeled and evaluated based on customer system time. A detailed analysis of the simulation revealed that, in the current setup, the utilization of the cash registers is high (88%); consequently, several scenarios that decrease the load on the cash registers were explored. To reduce customer wait times and, therefore, serve more customers per hour, it is recommended that Tim Hortons operate with five servers. A five-person setup with three cashiers, a soup server, and a sandwich server could reduce customer system time by over two minutes per customer. As an alternative, transferring all food preparation to the secondary service location and adding a dual-purpose server could reduce customer system time by over one half.