Service Strategies For“internet Plus Catering”Enterprises

Recently,China's catering industry achieves stable increase.With the development of internet,many innovative service modes are launched."Internet plus catering"service modes such as take-out and Group-buying come out and earn a huge market.However,traditional restaurants do not know how to make decisions on weather they should apply the new coming service modes,how to serve customers if they launch the new modes and how to conduct the allocation of service resource,because there is a lack of research in the academic field and operation experience in the industry.So,research on the service strategies for the "internet plus catering" is needed.Based on the field research in different restaurants,this research applies the theory of restaurant operation,queueing theory,service chain and resource allocation to analyze the service strategies of the "internet plus catering" enterprises.First,the restaurant service processes and service nodes are discussed.Then,the meal preparation process is described to illustrate the allocation strategies of meal preparation resources.At last,service models of take-out delivery and table allocation are built to study customers' eating service processes.The details and conclusions of this research are showed below.(1)The restaurant service processes and service nodes are discussed.Results reflect that the order receiving node and customer eating node show influences over each other.As for the service time,order receiving time is so short that can be ignored and meal preparation takes a long time.Serving customers in the restaurant and delivering food for the customers spend large amount of time.(2)In the study of meal preparation service node,M/G/1-GI/G/n queue is applied to describe the meal preparation process.The approximation of the meal preparation time is provided.Results show that the meal preparation duration a restaurant promises to the customers should be larger than the expected meal preparation time derived by the approximated formula.With the increase of the service intensity,the probability that the meal preparation time of a certain meal is larger than restaurant's promise increases.(3)In the study of the take-out service node,M/G/1-GI/G/n and M/G/1-GI/G/n-GI/G'/m queues are used to describe the take-out service processe and the approximation of the service time is provided.With the objective of maximizing the restaurant's profit,service allocation model of take-out service is built and the optimal decision is discussed.The profits of self-delivery and outsource-delivery are compared to show which one is more profitable under different situations.The conditions under which a restaurant achieves more profits by launching take-out service are discussed.Results show that if the price of take-out service is small,outsource-delivery should be applied and if the price is large,self-delivery is more profitable.When the price of the take-out service is moderate,if customers'arrival rate is small,outsource-delivery should be used,otherwise self-delivery is more suitable.If there is no rent cost,higher take-out food price brings larger profit.(4)In the study of the customer eating service node,two kinds of customers with different patience levels are considered:regular customers(customers with no Group-buying coupon)and Group-buying customers.Table allocation model is built to achieve the optimal table allocation plan with the objective of maximizing the restaurant's profit.Different queueing rules,mixed queue and separate queues,are compared and the conditions under which a restaurant can achieve more profits by launching Group-buying strategy are discussed.Results show that when Group-buying customers are not patient,separate queues should be used,and when the patient degree of the Group-buying customers is moderate,mixed queue is more profitable.If the Group-buying customers are patient,when regular customers are very patient or very impatient,mixed queue should be applied,otherwise the separate-queue rule is more suitable.As for the conditions of launching Group-buying strategy,if the arrival rate of regular customer is small or the regular customer is not patient,Group Buying brings more profits.(5)Based on the field research,the service nodes and service resource of Domino's Pizza are considered.Results show that the restaurant should allocate its service resource to make sure the service intensity of meal preparation queue is less than 0.8.If the arrival rate of take-out order is less than 2,outsource-delivery strategy is more profitable.Otherwise,self-delivery mode brings more profits.As for the customer eating service,launching Group-buying cannot bring more profits to Domino's Pizza.