Customer experience management in Food and Beverage outlet at Indian School of Business: Methodology and recommendations

In a regular consumer product industry, stockouts are prevented by carrying safety stock to prevent underserving caused by changes in customer demand, incorrect forecast or variability in lead times. But, for a food outlet like the one at Indian School Business, option of carrying safety stock is not viable because of the need to provide freshly cooked meals to ISB residents. Besides, the food outlet being the sole provider has no incentives to reduce stockouts, as they have no fear of losing revenue, gross profit, customers and market share. Hence, innovative, easy to implement and practical ways of addressing the twin problem of long queues and poor customer experience needs to be investigated. Current work analyses the demand pattern of 11 different food items across a routine day. Based on this optimum resource allocation for all food items has been carried out by solving a linear programming problem with cost minimization as the objective. Concurrently, recommendations have been devised to address this demand and supply side problem keeping in mind their practicability. Currently, the recommendations are being discussed and implemented at ISB Hyderabad campus.