Designing a Layout and Flow for Poppy Café: An Essay

Current Situation of Poppy Café

An individual essay on the principles of layout and flow.
Poppy Café are a very busy city centre café, open for breakfast and lunch . In the past 2 years, they had invested significantly in new equipment for the kitchen to cope with high volume orders, given their popularity with shoppers and local retail businesses. In terms of their offering, they have a smaller, refined menu. They will however match to customer needs they are especially good at adapting products to meet dietary requirements (gluten free, vegetarian and vegan options). There has not been much seasonal impact but given the nature of their hospitality offering, they have high staff utilisation with good customer service skills required.

This assessment allows you to engage with academic sources and evaluate how operations concepts are evident in practice. This task will encourage you to read into relevant literature and provide illustrative data to support your evaluation.

The Poppy Café is a large food and beverage facility and is planning for re-opening after lockdown. They are looking to reorganise their layout and flow their café and have asked you, given your operations management knowledge, to support this by providing a report. At the point of opening, they have decided to keep 1 meter social distancing between tables for customer experience, and to have a system in place that is ‘future-proof’ in case of future Covid restrictions for hospitality. The manager of Poppy Café would like you to design the café area that includes:

Sit down table service with space for 10 tables of 4 people, 5 tables of 6 people and 5 tables of 2 people Fridges for take away lunch products (meal deals – e.g. sandwiches, salads, drinks)
A counter area for staff to prepare orders/drinks/manage payment
A one-way system – the front door will act as the entry point and the back door will act as an exit point to support one-way traffic (staff exempt from this). Toilets are located near the back door but bear in mind café users will use the toilet during their visit, not always at the end so, this has to be considered in terms of flow.

As covered in class, you should identify the relevant process and layouts that Poppy Café should adopt for their requirements, which will include a critical assessment of the benefits and limitations. Please support your assessment of these changes with visual evidence (drawings/diagrams). You will also need to consider signage so customers are aware of how they can safely move around Poppy Café. The illustration is not be to scale so no site dimensions are required, just consideration of design of layout, flow and processes.

As you will also know from your studies, processes and layouts will be aligned to volume-variety requirements. Given the information you have received about Poppy Café, provide a 4Vs illustration with supporting analysis. A 4Vs template can be found in the assessment folder.
You expected to define your concepts using academic sources and use visual data to support your assessment of changes and what you are recommending to Poppy Cafe.