Question

Managing Service, Information and Control

Please Read, Review, Analyze, Manage, and Solve. Answer questions and give thorough solutions and solid plans for everything below.

Going Lean at Starbucks

It started off as a day basically like any other. You went into the Starbucks that you manage, helped the employees open the store, and thought about making a dent in the mountain of paperwork left over from the previous week. But then, you got an unexpected visit from a team at the corporate office. They started talking about the need to lower labor costs, improve efficiency, and increase productivity. When you asked them how they planned on doing all that, their response was “lean production.”

They informed you that lean production is a management philosophy derived from Toyota that is focused on reducing waste. Whether it’s wasted motion, wasted time, or wasted parts, the goal of lean production is to eliminate waste so that all the members of an organization can do their work efficiently. The executives then show you all the “waste” that’s in your stores right now—baristas bending over to scoop coffee from a counter below, others waiting for coffee to fully drain before starting a new pot, one worker carrying trays of pastries from storage to the display case, another spending ten seconds per drink to read the milk label. They even show you a map showing the winding trail that a barista takes in making a single drink. It looks like a big pile of spaghetti, you think to yourself.

With lean production, the executives explain, you can reduce the amount of motion that employees spend making drinks, and the amount of time they spend reaching for stuff, reading labels, or moving from here to there. This will make your store more efficient and productive, so that the same number of employees can serve more customers.

You’re intrigued by all of this, as nothing would please your supervisors more than increased revenue and lower costs. But you’re also worried about how your employees will react. Many of them came to work at Starbucks because it wasn’t like other fast-food chains that only focus on speed, speed, and speed. How will they feel once you tell them that they’ll have to change the way they work to become faster? What if they feel like you just want them to be coffee-making robots, leaving them no time to interact with customers or experiment with new drinks? Consider these issues with the questions below.

1. How would an increase in efficiency and production benefit your employees?
2. How would you address employees’ concerns that they are being transformed into coffee-making robots?

The Problem with Cups

Starbucks has always strived to take leadership in environmental issues, whether it was by encouraging customers to compost used coffee grounds or offering free coffee drinks to customers who brought in their own reusable mugs. But the company faces a major problem that has few solutions—cups. Across all of its stores, Starbucks uses more than 3 billion paper cups every year, most of which end up in the trash. Though the company would love to recycle these cups, it can’t, since most processors don’t have a process for recycling paper cups that are lined with plastic, as the Starbucks cups are. The plastic lining also prevents the cups from being composted.

3. How can Starbucks maintain its commitment to reducing waste as it keeps sending paper cups to landfills?
4.   What steps do you think Starbucks could take to reduce the number of paper cups it uses?
5.   Describe the strategies managers can use for waste prevention and reduction.

Answer 1

How can Starbucks maintain its commitment to reducing waste as it keeps sending paper cups to landfills?

Lean manufacturing processes improve plant efficiency by reducing delay times and promote seamless running without deviations. Through productivity and production will encourage workers to operate in a cohesive manner without thinking about any errors and sustainably have improved customer service. This will help improve employee loyalty and allow them to have more resources available that can be used for other marketing tasks such as learning about new goods or even working at a different station. Increasing productivity and output would also result in higher profits which will lead to other incentives for workers

What steps do you think Starbucks could take to reduce the number of paper cups it uses?

Lean may allow those tasks as repetitive and excludes all arbitrary factors that are included in a process. This sometimes gives the illusion that one functions as a robot without any space for extra activity. As a store manager, I will understand that this style of operating would help minimize waiting time for the customer and will allow the staff to be more aware of the customer needs. The extra time workers will spend in increasing their client experiences and creating cross-selling potential. This will help the store to increase its sales and also provide an incentive for workers to shine within the shop. The extra time saved is often used for the advancement of workers, and he

Describe the strategies managers can use for waste prevention and reduction.

A way to guarantee that product quality does not degrade with the rise in manufacturing speed is by enforcing some acceptable minimum requirements for the goods and also by ensuring preparation for workers so that the space for defects is reduced and any mistakes in the process are avoided.