I love fried chicken, (part of one vision...) When I was a kid, it was an adventure to go to the stadium to watch a football game with my dad, followed by either a vindaye and watercress in maison bread, or the luxury of a 2 piece chicken meal from KFC (at that time popularly known as “kentucky”).
I still love the treat of friend chicken and have my favourite chicken stall at Yishun Ring Road. I also like fast food fried chicken, including KFC of course.
My last 2 attempts at having fast food fried chicken in Singapore were disasters. In both cases I waited more than 30 minutes for my fried chicken. Hence the title: “land of slow fast food (fried chicken!)”
As I am someone who is really into using analytics to make a difference, I was not very happy at how, given the data they have, the 2 fast food chains messed up.
I will go in reverse chronological order, starting with the easier problem to solve.
Texas Chicken Sengkang
We went to
Texas Chicken Sengkang. We waited for 35 minutes for a standard chicken set.
The thing is that there simply was no visible queue. People who were waiting to
eat-in were simply inside at their tables, waiting for their orders to be ready.
It was the day of the presidential elections, so as I was checking on my order, I told a couple who was considering ordering that I had been waiting for close to 30 mins. The guy decided to order and go vote, knowing he’d be done before his order was ready, and he was right.
The case of
Texas chicken is simple, they basically had too many orders, including remote
orders (online) so they basically delayed everyone.
This is a clear issue of bad planning. If they have a system to manage their capacity to deliver orders, they obviously forgot that election day was a public holiday (it was announced on August 11 that if there was more than 1 candidate the polls would be on Sep 1, no excuse there).
I also happened to see only 3 and then 4 staff members in kitchen and front-office. I can easily understand why, given the variety of the menu, including delicious biscuits, it would take good planning from a resource perspective and clearly the manager was overwhelmed. A fellow frustrated customer told me, since I was taking pictures: “if you complain, her name is XXX, that is the manager”, but to me it is not really the manager’s fault. The organization failed at equipping her with tools for planning, or did not train her well enough to deal with the data.
This is a simple resource planning issue. You can make things a little bit more complex by adding the menu variety and the orders. Simple resource optimization with constraints, then you can add more constraints.
But my point is that there is enough information to enable the manager, after all they are the ones facing hangry customers. Whether it is because of process, lack of staff, inability to access relevant data (organization willful blindness), this can be resolved.
You know it will be a public holiday (voting day), you can expect higher demand, not a normal BAU Friday morning. You also know, in advance, that you can ask staff to be available. Then you know what orders are coming in, from where, in what order. It is a simple resource allocation problem.
KFC at AMK
We went to
KFC AMK, before dinner time (we expected quick meal since we were hungry)
ordered a meal of 2 pieces of original recipe chicken each. While orders may
not be fulfilled in the order they were received, I think you would agree it is
ridiculous to see many people who arrived after you for half an hour getting
their orders earlier.
After some observation, I figured out what was wrong.
The chicken was coming out from the kitchen alright, but while we had been waiting 2 batches of chicken that were prepared were both spicy, not original. (1) It was a decision by management of the branch to keep customers who ordered original recipe chicken waiting.
I have no idea how long I would have waited, since I went to the counter to change our order to spicy and my order was fulfilled within the next few minutes.
To me, this is horrible, blind management. There is so much technology that is lying around the branch, from collating the detailed orders (self-serve kiosks) to machines that track orders and display the status, but it did not help my order and that of other people waiting for a long time – presumably original recipe lovers like me. Whether it was a conscious decision on the part of the branch management, or a default setting from HQ, or some preset rules, I have no clue, but to me it is a failure to use the data they have.
Unless KFC Singapore chooses to make some customers ordering their likely flagship product wait for ages, this should not be happening.
There actually are many ways to solve this problem. At a simple level it is about optimizing the orders: minimizing the wait time, given what has been ordered, the capacity of the kitchen and the staff. This can be optimised on the spot as the orders come in, the data is already captured, do something with it...
With some more effort, the displays at the kiosks can be enhanced to inform customers about the orders. Frankly, seeing your order being prepared for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a fast food joint is ridiculous.
Failing that, a minimum prediction of how much of what should be prepared and when. You do not have to wait for the order to prepare the meal. I remember the scene in the founder where the main character checked out the fast food and was shocked to be able to just pick his order without waiting…(2). It is a simple job of predicting the food required and prepare some of it in advance. Of course there is a risk that your prediction is wrong and the food gets cold, but it is a balance between this and extra ordinary waiting times. Analytics can work with the business to optimize this.
Now if you combine all 3 components (predict what you are likely to need, optimize your orders, inform customers at point of order), you get a nice ‘living’ system whereby everyone is informed, makes decisions accordingly. If I really have to wait 30minutes for my original chicken at point of order, I am likely to switch to spicy; but at least it is a decision I make and is within my control as a customer. KFC gets food delivered to happy customers.
Many analytics solutions are actually made up of different components supporting each others, and if well designed can work by themselves, but work better with a second component. This is how I prefer to work, show results quickly, gain acceptance – includes training people to use the system- and keep growing the results and the ability of people to use the system, rather than a big bang approach. But then this depends on the ability of the organization, especially people on the ground, to adopt the use of data.
Conclusion
Data is
just data, or even worse is noise, unless the people on the ground are aware of
how to use it, and the organization implementing it. KFC Singapore and Texas
Chicken Singapore have obviously invested in technology, generate sufficient
data, but do not seem to have enabled decision making on the ground by
educating the staff and enabling them to make decisions.
In this day an age, this is really not doing right by their customers and staff.
If any of my contacts, readers agree with this post and know decision makers in KFC/Texas or any other fried chicken/fast food joint that is serving slow food and is unhappy about it, please make the introduction, the rest will be up to us 😊
- There was a country wide promotion for special flavour chicken, but the promotion was not being advertised at that branch.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KultzqPJaJs
- Thanks to hotpot for AI generated image
