Sample result
Critical Problem Analyzer for Restaurants
The owner asked this:«Tuesday-to-Friday lunch dropped from 52 to 45 covers per location and it has been eight weeks. On the floor everything looks the same and nobody knows what happened.»
① The symptom with a number, and what moved before it
What: covers in the 12:00–14:30 window, Tuesday to Friday. How much: −7 per location per day, 13.5% off the baseline of 52. Since when: the curve falls from week 3 of the last 8 and flattens in week 6. Where it hurts: dining room, not delivery. What the month costs: 7 covers × 2 locations × 4 days × 4.3 weeks = 241 covers, which at the 48,000 COP ticket is 11,568,000 COP of sales and 7,635,000 COP of product contribution a month.
To put it on the house's scale: operating profit for the whole month, at 8% on 214,000,000 COP, is 17,120,000 COP. This leak is taking 45% of that.
| Week | What changed | Who decided it | Observed effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nothing on record | — | Baseline: 52 covers per location |
| 2 | The cook on the pass at location 2 leaves | Resignation | None that same day |
| 3 | An assistant covers the pass, with no written standard recipe | Chef | The drop begins, at location 2 only |
| 4 | Delivery-platform promotion | The platform | 90 more orders a month through that channel |
| 6 | A new meat supplier comes in | Purchasing | No measurable effect on covers |
| 8 | The drop shows up at location 1 too | — | 45 covers per location |
SUPUESTO: product contribution is calculated at 66%, the complement of the 34% food cost the house declares; payroll and rent stay out of the dish per the house costing rule. If the real food cost of lunch were higher than the menu average —and it usually is when the dish that rules is a bandeja— the leak in money is smaller than calculated and drops one notch of urgency. The cause does not change.
② Three rival hypotheses, and the one that survived
| Hypothesis | Evidence for | Evidence against | Status | Missing data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A · Delivery is eating the dining-room customer | Delivery orders rise from week 4 | They rise by 90 orders a month and the dining room loses 241 covers: not even half adds up. And the drop began in week 3, before the promotion | Discarded | — |
| B · A competitor opened nearby | Nobody has looked | The drop starts at one location and the other takes 5 weeks to follow; a new competitor does not respect that order | On hold | A 20-minute walk around the block. Costs nothing and nobody has done it |
| C · Lunch has been going out slower since the pass changed | The drop starts in week 3, at location 2, the week after the assistant came in. It concentrates in 12:30–13:30, the hour of whoever has a counted lunch break | The floor manager says «everything looks the same» — and it does look the same: the tables are full, they just take longer to clear | Standing | Time 20 orders in that window at each location, 2 days |
The root cause, with its chain. It is not the cook who left. It is that the lunch ticket time was never written down, so it lived in one person's memory. When that person left, the assistant rebuilt it his own way; the pass got longer; the 30-to-45-year-old professional eating on a counted hour waited once, waited twice and stopped coming back. Location 1 followed location 2 five weeks later because there the same post is covered by different people each week, and with no written standard everyone does it their own way.
The cause is a standard that does not exist, not a person who failed. And there is a second one, which shows up when you ask why the pass could stretch for five weeks without anyone noticing: nobody measures ticket time. The symptom took eight weeks to reach the till because there was nowhere else it could have surfaced sooner.
The full example has 1 more part(s): you see them inside the library, with your account.