10. Results and lessons

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10.1 The week in numbers

Production orders closed	77
Semi-finished food made (deboned chicken, bases, gravy, marinade)	11,692 kg
Outlet packs made	13,818
Packs sent to outlets	12,763 in 800 transfers
Supplier deliveries received	38
Quality inspections decided	53
Chicken refused at the door (warm crates)	36 kg, returned to the farm
Pouches rejected after cooking (failed seal)	6
Material usage against the recipes	-0.04%
Cost variance to profit and loss	INR 1.62
OEE, best and worst station	90.5% (dough line) and 74.1% (packing)

10.2 What changed

Planning stopped being a spreadsheet. One run at 2 am plans every pack, every semi-finished level and every ingredient, day by day, from the outlets' forecast. The planner's job became deciding, not calculating: converting tomorrow's orders, pulling in a delivery, moving a batch to another night.

Every pack carries its true cost. Ingredients at the cost of the lots really used, plus the time at each station, plus the bones sold on taken off. When a run costs more, the variance report says which order, and the MCSR says which ingredient or whether it was time.

Food safety is a hold, not a clipboard. Warm chicken never reached the kitchen; cooked food could not be sent until its temperatures were entered. The inspection record is the food safety log.

A recall takes two screens. From the lot on a complaining customer's pouch, to the farm's delivery it came from, to the 8 outlets that still had some.

The outlets' stock is known. Every outlet is a store, every morning's van is a transfer, every night's usage is recorded, so stock in transit and at every outlet ties to the books.

10.3 Lessons for your own kitchen

1. Put the loss where it happens. Scrap on the ingredient (onion skins), yield on the process (evaporation). Getting these right is what makes the plan buy the right amount.
2. Make semi-finished food an item. A base used in three recipes, made once, traced once.
3. Set the cost per hour of every station. Without it, labour and gas are invisible in the pack cost.
4. Plan only the kitchen's stores. Outlet shelves are not the kitchen's stock.
5. Spread forecasts by day. A kitchen cooks every night, not once a month.
6. Book time, or let output book it. Either way the batch carries its conversion cost; on a rate line, reporting output does it.
7. Let OSERP pick the lots. First expiry first out, every issue and every transfer, and the recall chain never breaks.
8. Run the recall drill monthly. It takes two minutes, and the day it is real you will know it works.

10.4 Exercises

1. A recipe makes 100 kg of base from 60 kg of onions with 3% scrap at 85% yield. How many kilograms of onions does one kilogram of base need?
2. The chicken tikka recipe has a yield of 98%. How many pouches does an order for 300 good pouches take?
3. A batch of 264 kg of boneless chicken used ingredients worth INR 79,213 and station time worth INR 5,313, and made 118.8 kg of bones valued at INR 40/kg. What did one kilogram of boneless chicken cost?
4. Why does the planning run look only at CK-RM, CK-FG and QC-HOLD, and what would happen if it looked at every store?
5. A van with 30 outlets' packs has not been received by noon. Where do you see it, and what does the books' Stock in Transit show?
6. The kettles lose 45 minutes a night to clean-downs between vegetarian and non-vegetarian batches. What would you change, and on which screen?
7. A customer at outlet 040 complains about a biryani base. List, in order, the screens you would open.
8. Chicken arrives at 7 C. Can the night shift use it if nobody inspects it? Why?

Answers

1. 0.60 x 1.03 / 0.85 = 0.727 kg of onions per kilogram of base.
2. 300 / 0.98 = 306.12: the order takes 307 pouches (pieces are whole, rounded up).
3. (79,213 + 5,313 - 118.8 x 40) / 264 = (84,526 - 4,752) / 264 = INR 302.18 a kilogram.
4. Stock on outlet shelves is already the outlets', waiting for their customers. Counted as supply, it would make the kitchen think it had days of gravy in hand, and the night shift would cook nothing. Stores to plan in the planning defaults keeps it out, for the nightly run too.
5. Inventory > Stock in Transit, by transfer and lot, with the days on the road. The Stock in Transit account carries exactly their value; the check at the top of the screen confirms the two agree.
6. Cook all vegetarian batches first and clean the kettles once. On the Scheduling Board, raise the priority of the vegetarian orders so they are scheduled first, then Apply dates. OEE shows whether changeover time falls.
7. Lot Trace with the item and the lot on the label: Where it went (which outlets still have it), then Made by (the order and its input lots), then each input lot back to its goods receipt and supplier. Then Quality > Decided for that lot's inspection readings.
8. No. Whole chicken has an incoming quality plan, so the delivery is held in QC-HOLD from the moment it is received. Nothing in QC-HOLD can be issued to production. Somebody must inspect it; at 7 C the check fails, and accepting it anyway needs a written reason.

Further reading

• Inventory field guide
• Inventory
• The interior design case study - projects, client and subcontractor portals

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