Fallen Arches: Fixing service at McDonald’s

What counts as good service at a fast food restaurant? Speed obviously matters but what about staff interactions? No expects a quick service restaurant to have a Zagat’s rating (although some Chicago hot dog stands are graded) but can fast food service slip so much that customers notice?

Apparently the answer is yes, and furthermore McDonald’s hasn’t been doing so well in delivering service (McDonald’s Tackles Repair of ‘Broken’ Service, Apr 10).

But achieving speed and friendliness of service across the chain has been a particularly elusive goal, at least in part because about 90% of McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. are owned by independent operators.

In QSR Magazine’s annual Drive-Thru Study, the only comprehensive industry comparison of customer service at fast-food chains, other restaurants have consistently outperformed McDonald’s in those areas. In last year’s study, the average service time at the McDonald’s drive-through studied was 188.83 seconds, compared with 129.75 for industry leader Wendy’s Co.  Chick-fil-A had the top friendliness ratings. Out of the seven major chains in the study, McDonald’s was second to last in the “very friendly” ranking, just above Burger King.

So what are the root causes of the problem and what can they do about it?

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The Unbearable Lightness of Lululemon Yoga Pants

So Lululemon has a problem with its yoga pants. It is of the I-see-England-I-see-France variety (Lululemon Yoga Pants Pulled From Stores for ‘Sheerness’, Wall Street Journal, March 19).

The yoga-apparel retailer’s shares tumbled late Monday after saying it has pulled some of its popular pants from stores, after a mistake by a supplier left the pants too see-through. …

“The ingredients, weight and longevity qualities of the pants remain the same but the coverage does not, resulting in a level of sheerness in some of our women’s black Luon bottoms that falls short of our very high standards,” Lululemon said in a release.

Lululemon said Monday it has used the same manufacturing supplier on key fabrics since 2004 and is working to understand what happened.

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Managing quality and variety at Lego

When I was a kid, I loved Legos. So I was, of course, pleased when my kids started playing with them. In the last year or so, my kids have outgrown them. And while having all the Legos put away makes it a little safer to walk barefoot across the family room, it does make me a litte sad. Which is why, I guess, I have a soft spot for stories about Legos.

Like, for example, a BBC story asking just how many Legos can you stack on top of each other (How tall can a Lego tower get?, Dec 3). Turns out, you can make a pretty tall tower.

Ian Johnston and the team do two more tests to be sure we hadn’t just happened upon the strongest Lego brick in existence. And in fact they were impressed at the consistency of Lego manufacture.

The average maximum force the bricks can stand is 4,240N. That’s equivalent to a mass of 432kg (950lbs). If you divide that by the mass of a single brick, which is 1.152g, then you get the grand total of bricks a single piece of Lego could support: 375,000.

So, 375,000 bricks towering 3.5km (2.17 miles) high is what it would take to break a Lego brick.

Here’s a graphic to help visualize 375,000 Lego bricks.

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Good news for better air travelers: More on-time flights

For those heading to an airport for the Thanksgiving holiday, the New York Times (Airlines’ On-Time Performance Rises, Nov 21) has some good news: More flights are leaving on time!

There are, of course, some devils in the details behind these aggregate numbers. Performance can vary by month simply because of weather (apparently August and January are the worst) and the numbers above do not reflect commuter airlines affiliated with major carriers (so going home to a small regional airport may be more touch and go). Also, as the graph makes clear, it sucks to be a major airline that like United goes through multiple computer glitches in a year.

So how have the airlines brought up their performance? By focusing on the processes needed to get planes out.

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It’s election day. Do you know if your ballot is secure?

Chicago Public Radio has a fun series of reports titled Curious City. The premise of the series is that listeners submit Chicago-related questions (e.g., what’s with 16 inch softballs?) and they go out to find the answer. Some of their questions have an operational bent, although “how do they clean The Bean?” or “how do the reversible express lanes on the Kennedy work?” have seemed a little too Chicago-centric to write about here.

But this past week they hit on a question that has relevance across the country: What are elections authorities doing to protect voting?

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Monitoring quality via online reviews

Pretty much every e-commerce site now allows customers to express their opinion about products. Such reviews can certainly be helpful to other customers, but how do firms use the feedback? According to the Wall Street Journal, some firms are now using the reviews to monitor for quality problems (Firms Take Online Reviews to Heart, Jul 29).

L.L. Bean Inc. noticed earlier this year that one of its top-selling products, Supima Cotton Fitted Sheets, was being slammed in online customer reviews.

The company, which pulled the sheets from its website, found that a wrinkle-resistance treatment mistakenly added by a contractor was causing the cotton fabric to unravel. It offered new sheets to the 6,300 customers who had purchased the set and destroyed the rest of the faulty batch.

“Before, it would have taken us months and months to figure out if something was wrong with the product through returns, if we ever would have known at all,” said Steve Fuller, L.L. Bean’s chief marketing officer.

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Executive Operations Experience: From Strategy to Execution

For once we are not reporting on external content but on our own: I am excited to announce a totally new approach to executive learning and education on operations. Co-author and co-blogger Gad Allon and I have been working with our friends at McKinsey & Company to design the Executive Operations Experience: From Strategy to Execution.

A new collaboration between the Kellogg School of Management and McKinsey & Company.

Operations executives who are eager to stay current, hone their skills and broaden their networks, take note! In an exciting cooperative venture,  the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois, USA, and McKinsey & Company will be offering a first-of-its-kind, experiential learning program starting in the fall of this year. Four, three-day sessions taking place at McKinsey’s model factories throughout Europe will provide a curriculum that covers all operational functions, jointly taught by both academics and consultants. Learn if the program might be right for you here.

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Lemons are disappearing from the auto industry

My kids have had the good fortune of never riding in a really bad car. Even the used Carolla we owned years ago was very reliable. My parents worked through their share of crappy cars from the Vega with an unreliable engine block to the Fury III that was prone to stalling just as it was hitting the entrance ramp to the highway. But as NPR reports, my kids may never know a true lemon (U.S. Automakers Aim To Eliminate Lemons, Apr 3).

[Reporter TRACY] SAMILTON: The trucks built in this Detroit factory are getting high marks from outside rating groups. But a similar turnaround is happening pretty much everywhere, with just about every car company. Quality, once largely the domain of Toyota and Honda, is now simply the price of entry.

Jesse Toprak is an analyst with TrueCar.com.

JESSE TOPRAK: So you go to any dealership today, buy any new car in the U.S. dealerships, you’re not going to get a clunker that’s going to fall apart on you.

SAMILTON: Toprak says quality has been rising for at least 20 years, and the gap between the best and worst is shrinking.

The claim about the convergence in the quality of US and import brands is shown by this graph of the well-known J.D. Power study of initial vehicle quality:

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Factory of the Future: VW’s innovative “Transparent Factory” in Dresden, Germany

I love to see how things are made and VW makes that especially joyful in their novel “transparent factory.” This is a completely new approach to factory design and architecture with several noteworthy innovations that make this a perfect fit-in for a center location in beautiful downtown Dresden:

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Service Recovery at Airlines

You know the drill. You go to the airport, knowing fair and square that the likelihood that your flight will leave on time, arrive on time and your luggage will be at the destination (undamaged) is very slim. You also know that if something goes wrong, say your flight will be delayed or cancelled, you will get literally nothing, and any attempt to resolve issues will be met with a huge line of customers with similar issues (and a miserable agent that is bound to hear all the complaints, with very little tools to resolve them). Some of the issues are really outside the control of the airline, such as weather and airport related congestion. Yet, I would like to discuss the inability of airlines (among many other service firms) to perform, what some refer to as, service recovery. First, if airlines really wanted, they could use hedging strategies such as excess capacity of staff, which they do in a relatively mild manner. But, the fact is that very seldom issues are being resolved quickly and in a satisfactory manner. The issue, I believe, is that airlines do not seem to understand the pitfalls and opportunities that lie in service recovery.

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