I don’t know with you, but I love milkshakes! They are delicious, nutritious, and easy to make. Who would have thought that I would need Six Sigma to make my milkshake business work?
You heard it right. Six Sigma is actually being used by Red Robin Restaurants to be able to serve the best milkshakes to their customers. GE Commercial Finance, Franchise Finance offered the Red Robin operations team “At the Customer, For the Customer” (ACFC), an innovative program that brings the vast resources and management tools of GE directly to customers to enhance quality and customer service.
Together GE ACFC and Red Robin teams chose milkshake delivery as the first improvement project. Naturally, GE quickly put Six Sigma to work for Red Robin.
Mike Woods, senior vice president at Red Robin, says:
“In 2005, we will produce more than five million milkshakes. Because we focus on serving the highest quality food and beverages, it’s extremely important our milkshakes are delivered as soon as they’re made. Before ACFC, we were delivering milkshakes on-time only 36 percent of the time in one particular region. This meant our guests weren’t receiving milkshakes as soon as they were made and, potentially, received partially melted milkshakes when they were delivered. After ACFC, on-time delivery of milkshakes jumped to 77 percent. The project was a huge success, with on-time delivery more than doubling!”
As soon as they deployed Six Sigma, many issues had been identified and addressed. One major issue was not using the First Available Server Transport (FAST) that was just lying around Red Robin’s kitchen. Continue reading…
Indeed, Six Sigma, being data driven and fact-based, identifies problems and is equipped with tools and statistics to improve business processes.
Sounds cool. I never imagined that it could be implemented for the improvement of milkshake delivery. I’ve got a lot to learn about Six Sigma, hehe.
Right Lynn! That makes Six Sigma interesting!