PAOLA Q.

CASTRO
20141332

MODULE 4: TIME AND MOTION STUDY FOR RESTAURANT

Time-motion studies can show you and your operations people a lot you probably don’t think
about during your typical busy day. You can evaluate your various production capacities against
your footprint and menu volumes. For example, in a typical time-motion study, Sill says, “Maybe
we’ll notice cooks have food staged on a cookline bench waiting to go to the fryer, grill or oven.
Well, that points to the fact that they have equipment capacity constraints. That happens when
people change their menus over time and wind up overusing one piece of equipment and
maybe underusing something they used to use more,” he says.
“A lot of times it is a nuance that only shows up during peak busy periods,” Sill notes. “When
they’re slow, they have plenty of capacity. When they’re busy, the wheels fall off. Doing a
capacity matrix by equipment is the first step to sorting out the situation.”
Tuning capacity, he says, gets right down to how many square inches a chicken breast uses on
the grill for how long, and how many are needed during peak periods.
Often, kitchen problems come down to right-sizing a 4-ft. grill to 3 ft., or vice versa, while
perhaps making up the difference with another piece of equipment.
Sometimes, Sill notes, it’s not even the size of the equipment that matters but the labor
deployed to it. Say a station is designed for a single operator, but demand goes up. Suddenly,
the equipment becomes a bottleneck because the one employee on the one piece of equipment
can only produce so much. But the mise en place isn’t set up for two workers to run the station.
A second cook comes in but ends up getting in the way rather than increasing production. Then
finding another solution becomes the challenge.

A serious time-motion study can get down almost to a molecular level, if you want it to, from
storage and prep to cooking, plating, delivery and cleanup. Or you can scale the project to
specific areas. Want to take a look at the menu and ingredients to see if there’s a simpler,
quicker way to get a similar result? You can do that. You might even decide you have labor tied
up doing tasks that the supplier could do for you for a fraction of the cost.
You can study employee motion. “Look at the cookline,” Simpson says. “Compare individuals’
actual movements with what they are supposed to be on paper. Map out the work zones. Note
where employees spend their time at peak periods. Peak periods have the most impact, so you
want a peak-time analysis. That sometimes points out obviously needed changes. Is someone
going back and forth too much, or is there too much cross traffic? Sometimes a kitchen gets
constructed based on an initial-cost basis as opposed to what’s an efficient operation,” he adds.
You can use that information not only to determine how an item should be made, but whether it
should be made. “We do time-motion not only on preparation, but on plating and assembly,”
Bendas emphasizes. “Then we can attribute a cost for that time.” He notes calculations account
for every labor task involved in every part of menu-item production. “That way we can evaluate
whether labor is justifiable for all ingredients prepped in the kitchen.
“You can break down labor and ingredient costs for sauces produced in the prep kitchen by the
ounce,” he notes. “You can look at a menu item, say this one is way too time intensive, and it’s
not a good seller, and you can take it off the menu.”
You also can use the same kind of data to reallocate which cooks perform which functions,
Bendas says. “Less complicated prep can be allocated to a different cooking position at a lower
hourly rate. Maybe you can’t save time, but you can reduce the labor cost.”