Reference no: EM133262600

An individual report on the principles of layout and flow. Mimi's Café* is a town centre café, due to open for breakfast and lunch (roughly 7am-4pm). They have renovated an older site, investing significantly in new equipment for the kitchen to cope with high volume orders. The owners of Mimi's have taken over a café which was previously very popular with shoppers and local retail businesses. In terms of what they expect to offer, they have a smaller, refined menu than the previous business. They will however match to customer needs, as they are especially good at adapting products to meet dietary requirements (gluten free, vegetarian and vegan options). There has not been much seasonal impact but given the nature of their hospitality offering, they have high staff utilisation with good customer service skills required.

Your Task This assessment allows you to engage with academic sources and evaluate how operations concepts are evident in practice. This task will encourage you to read into relevant literature and provide illustrative data to support your evaluation. Mimi's Café are looking to redesign the layout and flow of their café and have asked you, given your operations management knowledge, to support this by providing a report. Although there are no Covid restrictions in place, the previous owners had told them that customers liked having space between tables as these effectively accommodated wheelchairs and prams. They have decided to keep 1 metre social distancing between tables for customer experience, and to have a system in place that is 'future-proof' in case of future Covid restrictions for hospitality. The manager of Mimi's Café would like you to design the café area that includes: • Sit down table service with space for 10 tables of 4 people, 5 tables of 6 people and 5 tables of 2 people • Fridges for take away lunch products (meal deals - e.g., sandwiches, salads, drinks) • A counter area for staff to prepare orders/drinks/manage payment A one-way system - the front door will act as the entry point and the back door will act as an exit point to support one-way traffic (staff exempt from this). Toilets are located near the back door but bear in mind café users will use the toilet during their visit, not always at the end so, this has to be considered in terms of flow. As covered in class, you should identify the relevant operations process and layouts that Mimi's Café should adopt for their requirements, which will include a critical assessment of the benefits and limitations from academic sources. Having the right operations process and layout is a key element of how services are designed and delivered. Please support your assessment of these changes with visual evidence (drawings/diagrams of the new internal café layout). These drawings do not have to be completed specialised software and can be handdrawn. The critical aspect is that all relevant areas are encompassed within the assessment. You will also need to consider signage so customers are aware of how they can safely move around Mimi's Café. The illustration is not to be to scale, so no site dimensions are required, just consideration of design of layout, flow, and processes from an operations management perspective. As you will also know from your studies, processes and layouts will be aligned to volume-variety requirements. Given the information you have received about Mimi's Café, provide a 4Vs illustration with supporting analysis.