Sample Solution

temporarily to allow the receptionist to get their names, which takes about five minutes. Afterwards, the customers are again held temporarily while the table is being prepared, which takes again another five minutes. Looking at the other stages in the process map, chef’s cooking time and the customers’ eating time tends to be longest processes. It takes the chef about twenty minutes to cook and prepare the food. Similarly, it takes the customers about 20 minutes to consume the food.

Value Stream Mapping

A closer look at the process would reveal that certain activities and operations in the process map may be categorized as either value adding or non-value-adding. The value stream includes value-adding activities that help in the creation of the product or the delivery of the service (Jones 2002). Non-value adding activities in particular, refers to certain activities such as transferring materials between two non-adjacent workstations and waiting for service, which generally lengthen the processing time, increase the costs, and in most cases, increase customer frustration (Collier and Evans 2007). In the process map for the restaurant, stages in the process such as the customer waiting to be seated, to place the order, and to get the check are all non-value adding activities, which lengthens the process time and trigger customer frustration. Consequently, these non-value adding activities constitute about twenty minutes of the process time. For managers seeking to streamline the process, the purpose is to eliminate non-value adding activities in the process flow. The value-adding and the non-value adding activities extracte