Collaborative Design of Modularized Set-Meal Using the Mass Customization Concept

Abstract

A chain restaurant’s meal creation is a complicated process including tasks, such as the concept proposing, ingredient specifications, evaluation, and presentation design. These tasks are often cooperatively accomplished by staffs in the headquarter and its branches. However, the decisions of meal creation need to refer to the related data (such as customer preferences and feedbacks) that are often not organized, controlled and shared properly using the current product information management (PIM) solutions. The paper overcomes the current PIM deficiency by reengineering the set meal design process and its integrated information management. Using the modularized bill-of-materials data management concept, we develop a decision support system for set meal design, called collaborative meal planning (CMP) system, to enhance the efficiency of the meal planning and design process. Finally, the design interactions between headquarter and branches are studied to show the benefits in applying CMP. In the first phase of the study, the current data exchange model is derived. In the second phase, the to-be CMP-based meal design process is developed. In order to evaluating the performance of the proposed models, the case of a Japanese high-end chain restaurant is used to demonstrate the to-be CMP model at works with superior results.