What manufacturers can learn from the fast food industry (Part 1)

You may not have noticed, but today the organizational model of fast food manufacturers and restaurants has a lot in common. So what can manufacturers learn from today’s fast food industry?

Reaching one of the biggest fast-food chains today, you might find their organization more like a factory than a restaurant. The fast food industry offers enormous value, and most of its success has come from modern management methods are used in the restaurant supply chain, tracking inventory and maximizing the speed and quality of delivered products.

Identify potential market segments to do business

A fast food store is all located in a location targeted to their potential customers, which means that a business plan needs to be carefully prepared before the store goes on sale.

Fast food chains often use segmentation as a marketing tool. Segmentation is the process of discovering a core group of customers sponsoring your restaurant. This information is obtained mainly through market research surveys, the personal information of customers such as age, income and household size. For example, the majority of your clients can be 18-24 years old and make less than $ 40,000 per year. You can then locate these groups of people within a 5 km radius of your restaurant. Get the addresses of these people and send them coupons. You can also segment your market by customer activities, attitudes and usage, and this is exactly the same principle as choosing the type of production for your business.

See fast food processing as an efficient production model

In most cases, the efficiency of the production line is determined by the texture, shape and taste of the food. With the big fast food brands, they make decisions about their menus based on what can be flexibly changed like taste. This makes single-food restaurants look like a miniature factory.

The similarity between industrial production and fast food is so great that seven years ago, the Council of Economy Advisors (CEA) considered to classify fast food restaurants into similar groups with manufacturers, not service groups.

However, in many ways, fast food companies face different organizational challenges than industrial production. In particular, it is about meeting the needs of customers and adjusting their products to adapt to requirements in a short time without affecting production efficiency. This degree of flexibility can be used as a useful principle for industrial manufacturers.

(To be continue)

Productivity and Quality Office