Poster
Client Context
Waffle House is a restaurant chain in the United States that strives to deliver quality food, friendly service, and a welcoming presence to its customers. Waffle House’s restaurants (or units) are ideally organized into districts (three units), divisions (three districts), and areas (three divisions). The current process of assigning units to these structures is a non-scientific method, which results in excessive travel and an uneven distribution of workload for managers.
Project Objective
The motivation of this project is to reduce managers’ stress. Waffle House has identified operational factors that affect a manager’s job such as commute time, employee turnover rate, total demand, third shift volume, security-type incidents, and customer complaints. Waffle House believes these factors directly relate to how stressful a manager’s job is and how difficult a unit is to run.
Design Strategy
To accomplish this goal of reducing stress, an optimization model with multiple variations will be implemented to find the optimum groupings of districts, divisions, and areas. This model will bring value to Waffle House by decreasing their annual fuel and operational costs, as well as providing a systematic way of organizing their restaurant assignments in the future. We will also create a quantifiable way to measure how difficult a restaurant is to run, called a Difficulty Index. These metrics will be included in one variation of the optimization model to more evenly distribute more challenging stores across managers.
Deliverables
Waffle House will receive the two solutions using the Manager Commute Model based on their current units. This provides Waffle House with the option to use the solution that works best with their current needs. Also, we plan to deliver a user-friendly Excel spreadsheet with front-end capabilities allowing for the addition and removal of specific units, changes in manager salary and fuel costs, and the inclusion of the difficulty threshold.
Since Waffle House did not originally have a way of quantifying the difficulty of their restaurants, we will also include a program for calculating the Difficulty Index in the Excel interface. This will allow for redistribution of salaries for managers based on the Difficulty Index of the units they manage.
Project Information
Student Team
Hannah Arents, Yebin Choi, Mallory Davanzo, Carly Gustafson, Nithya Koganti, Brian Matthews, Wataru Tamura, Casey Wood
Faculty Advisor
Faculty Evaluator
