Project Scheduling

          For every company projects are necessary in progress of continuous improvement! Project is something that explains a process or often a single unit that is often located on one place, resources are brought to the project and may be of any size although we tend to focus on large projects generally. Dunkin Donuts is a fast food restaurant and completely focused on customer service as most of all the companies out there... Working for Dunkin Donuts the things I can tell about having a project in the store would be, having a goal or a target of monthly sales with the best customer service possible. As Dunkin Donuts is not the company that produces items to ship but, they do produce products which gets deliver straight to customers after it's made. Basic projects that do takes place in Dunkin Donuts are often the goal to achieve as a team in the store. And the tasks for this project can be training the employees for their best service possible, giving them enough knowledge to help them realize if the product is meeting its standards before it gets delivered to the customer. 
          Gantt charts are one of the tools helping the project getting done. That is shown as a bar chart. Do nor shows precedence relations, and as its shown as bar charts its easy to understand. Yes, the Gantt charts are used for project but showing only the statistics to help employees understand and have a better Idea on what their service level used to be, and what it needs to be. But the only thing that I would want to suggest is to have projects not just for service level only but for increasing the sales and over all continuous improvement as well.

Quality Control

          Quality control is that one important part of Managing Business that teaches to break down the production process into subprocesses and identifies the critical points wher inspection or measurement should take place. Dunkin Donuts is mainly focused on customer satisfaction and for that the frenchise does use quality control charts to improve their level of quality and service. And to inspect the idea of improving the quality and service the frenchise itself sends a person to inspect the products and level of service in every Dunkin Donuts. But even though frenchise has an inspector coming in every few months for inspection the store employees plays a big part in performing Quality check for the products and their services. As Dunkin Donuts concern continuous improvement is a must for their day to day business. And the way they performe this task is by using the cause and effect method, by looking at the cause of the issue they tend to factor it down into different departments and tries to resolve the cause of that issue.
          Every business today to achieve the position in market has to follow the steps of six sigma. Which are Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Contro. Six sigma uses a project/team approach as it is most helpful with the process of improvement in the Business. By working in Dunkin Donuts, I have noticed that working as a team following up with the quality check leads to continuous improvement. And that takes me back to the Six Sigma points. But one thing that I would want to suggest studying six sigma is that, the frenchise itself may help the store with defects on the quality of the product that they use, and the second thing that I think would be more on the shoulders of employees not messing up the order and pay more attention towards level of service that they can give. This may eliminate many of the defects a store might get during the peak hours.

Service Process Design

The three elements of service-product bundle are as follows:

The tangible service (Explicit Service)

The intangible or psychological benefits of the service (Implicit Service)

The physical goods (facilitating goods)

The Cell that Dunkin Donuts operate on in the service matrix is the co-routed service.

The type of customer contact they encounter is Permeable System where it's a face to face tight specs, and they respond by the production efficiency being in the mid-ranged, the sales opportunity is high mid-ranged, and the procedural skills, flow control, and electronic aids are high. Dunkin Donuts does not use self-service. Yes, Dunkin Donuts use technology, the type of technology they began in June 2009, for more information on the new technology view the URL (http://news.dunkindonuts.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=1111). Yes they do use a focused operation principle, the high contact services in where it requires employees who are flexible, personable and willing to work with customers (the smile factor). They support employees by the workplace design and the job design, such as one of their quotes   “At Franchisees of Dunkin' Donuts, our employees are the fuel that helps America run.” In the dunkin donuts website it explain how Dunkin Donuts Support there employees (https://www.dunkindonuts.com/aboutus/careers/).

Dunkin' Donuts is well known for their customer satisfaction and service. The types of service recovery they offer is that when something goes wrong during the time of deliverance, the cashier apologizes professionally and compensates the customers order in return for something else. However, if the customer just doesn’t like the product they can't simply return it, they can only receive another product. For example, if a customer has a complicated coffee order and the employer gets the order wrong, the employer has to offer them a new cup of coffee and remake the order the way the customer prefers. The type of guarantee they offer is not giving back the customer their money but replacing it with a no charge extra product to compensate their failed order. This provides satisfaction to the customer and provides feedback to the company.

Process Selection

Dunkin Donuts (DD) have medium variety of products and medium quantity is produced according to their daily demand. Overall the company could be viewed as it uses a batch method of flow process since they follow a combination of line and project. DD offers different verities of products, like beverages, bakery items, breakfast, lunch, and already manufactured products like cool drinks and water. Each product goes through a flow path and it uses general- purpose equipment such as oven, refrigerator, microwave oven, coffee maker, and blender; even though all the equipment is not used in producing all products. The workers at DD are expected to work in team. Instead of specialization on any task (like in line process), every one of them are capable of doing any task so as to keep up with the work load. DD offers drive through serving as well as front customer counter serving. Thus they make sure fresh and exact customer expectations are accomplished in a fastest way. Any member working at DD should be able to do order taking at drive through or front counter, through prepare the orders, and bake the items freshly once the display run out of stock to keep a clean, pleasant, attractive environment for the customers. Depending on the product type customer order process varies. When they produce bakery products such as Donuts, they already bake them for the day and have them in the display and sell them instantly. Make to stock’ method of customer order is used in these type of products. They same type is followed with muffins, Danish, Brownies, and like that. When it comes to cool drinks and water in bottles, the products are already bought from the suppliers and it is followed ‘make to stock’ method when a customer makes an order. This comes under the process characteristics matrix of batch/MTS.Hot and cold beverages, breakfast, and sandwiches are made instantly when a customer place an order so as to ensure standard quality. For example, when a customer orders for coffee, they can customize it by selecting the amount of sugar, milk, and size. They can add any flavor in it. When the customer order for a sandwich, even though it has a standard ingredients in it, the order can be still customized by the customer by selecting the type of bread, cheese, as well as the other ingredients. In these cases the ingredients are already made to stock and they are used to come out with the exact requirement of the customer. The optimum efficiency and effectiveness is attained through going with batch process and ATO method of customer order. They fall into in the process characteristics matrix of batch/ ATO.Another type would be, smoothies come in one size with different flavors. When a customer buys for a strawberry smoothie, it is made under ‘make to order’ type and batch/MTO process characteristic matrix.

Some of the factors influencing the process selection of Dunkin Donuts are Market conditions, Capital Requirements, Labor, and Technology.
The company should consider the Market conditions first. The batch flow approach would have a high product variety and a custom market type. Some capital requirements should also be considered. If the company wanted a great deal of capital then the process they should use would be the assemble-line process rather than the batch flow. The third factor would be the cost of labor. The batch flow process would consist of costly skilled workers where the factory line approach would be more inexpensive and low skilled labor. The last factor to consider for both product and process is Technology. There are risks in productions coming along that will make the process obsolete before the costs are recovered. The risk in order from highest to lowest would be assembly line, batch, and project.

Dunkin donuts cannot adopt mass customization, because fast changeover will take to long and you wouldn't be to have much control on the different of variation which will also decrease your chance of maximizing profit. Dunkin Donuts possible adopts the modular production of the mass customization method probably because by using the modular production and assemble to order. Which also build subassemblies in advance of demand, which is really important at dunkin donuts, so when the customer order is received, the subassemblies are taken from inventory and assembled together to fill the customers order.

Dunkin's Inventory management

Inventory is goods and materials, or those goods and materials themselves, held available in stock by a business. In business management, inventory consists a list of goods and materials that are held in stock for business.

Dunkin' Donuts has more than 1,000 donut varieties along with other products.

• Baked Goods
  
  • Donuts
    
    
    

    

    Various donuts
  • éclairs, fritters, crullers, bismarcks, and coffee rolls
  • Munchkins
  • Bagels
  • Scones
  • Fruit tarts
  • Muffins
  • Danish pastry
  • Cookies
  • Brownies
  • Cinnamon Twists
• Breakfast sandwiches
• Hash browns
• Oven toasted items
  
  • Flatbread sandwiches
• Coffee beverages
  
  • Bulk Coffee
  • Espresso, Cappuccino, and Lattes
  • Iced Coffee
  • Iced Lattes
  • Latte Lite Espresso
  • Turbo
• Other hot beverages
  
  • Hot chocolate
  • Tea
  • Vanilla Chai
  • Dunkaccino
• Cold beverages
• Coolattas
• Iced teas
• Smoothies

By working for the Franchise, I noticed that most of the time the Inventory Managers use the "Periodic" system to manage the weekly inventory. The store that i work for has goods for every 5 to 4 days and that is how the Periodic system works in more of the Dunkin Donuts or Baskin robins. They use this system also to handle their other miscellaneous goods and materials.

Behind The Scene of Dunkin Donuts operations

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