Process Improvement
Beleza Natural is a company that deals with women's hair and a wide range of cosmetics and beauty products. The company has specialized in providing hair solutions to the Brazilian woman who traditionally had to use hair treatment to make her hair look nice. The company has introduced kinky hair, waxy, and curly to transform the Latin American woman. The company is growing at a pace that is both a growth factor and a company's capacity problem. It currently serves around 60,000 customers in a month. According to the CEO, the company is overbooked on weekends, which means that the extra customers are underutilized.
The company has been seeking to change the layout, hire more employees, and conduct cross-training to improve the process. One of the fundamental improvements to the process is changing the design of the establishments under Beleza Natural. According to Krajewski et al. (2010), changing the structure increases the work area and comfort in a business that operates on a wait-in-line model. The waiting area needs screens to act as a distraction while the customers wait while also displaying various processes and hair products the company sells. The company uses a wait-in-line way of serving customers (Leite & Vieira, 2015). According to the CEO, 90% of the customers are repeat customers; it is crucial to capture the elusive 10%. Moreover, the surplus demands on weekends are underutilized.
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It is vital to reduce the queue durations by setting up a large workspace, and an accommodation block acts as a cushion to ensure the impatient customer has a reason to stay a while longer (Leite & Vieira, 2015). For instance, Madureira serves about 293 customers a day. The establishment has 41 employees spread over five main areas; reception, division, hydration, super relaxing, and hairstyling. The shop operates on a constant capacity of 60 customers within the working hours. The workflow rate between the different steps of the process indicates that all workers and work stations are running under optimal conditions. The quality of the employees and employees' utilization compared to hours/minutes shows a high level of performance because all the customers are served in the documented time of two minutes without necessarily creating a lot of waste. The establishment operates with two employees who act as receptionists. However, the salon operates under a capacity utilization of 40% from Monday to Friday and almost 100% on Saturdays. The super relaxing procedure gets the highest utilization with the lowest weekday percentage at 92%. Probably, an increase in the number of employees will likely increase output and productivity. If two employees can serve 293 clients without negative feedback, it is proper to suggest that they are fully utilized.
According to the new projections, increasing the number of employees will ease pressure on the available receptionists who are over performing. It will also enable the already accomplished super relaxer step to increase customer satisfaction and not solely focus on meeting targets. The average level of utilization level is at 78% of the employees' total performance versus the number of customers served. Beleza has an in-training facility that recruits and trains all its staff, 70% of former customers. By adopting such a process, the company will incur costs of expansion and rearrangement and the extra wages for the much-needed extra hands. The company has a 75% increase in customers over the weekend, which means that the firm has an idle demand to exploit. The demand rate is 24% between Monday- Friday, 33% on Fridays, and 42% on Saturdays. The expressed demand shows the inflow of customers per hour in the establishment, indicating that the firm has not fully tapped into the increasing demand, which increases steadily on weekends. In an attempt to balance the costs versus profits from the new process, the assumption is; if the company hires 100 more employees to cater to the extra capacity, the labor is at the right capacity. In terms of output, 40% of the number of customers over weekends, which amounts to over 24,000 new customers over the weekends each month. The figure brings the total customer base to roughly 84,000 a month; however, these are predictable results based on one of the establishments' current outlook. When multiplied by the average cost of treatment for the super relaxant, the company can cover remodeling and rehiring costs. Moreover, the company can balance the employee-customer ratio of 1 employee per 60 customers weekly. It is important to remember that the above calculations and possible scenarios are individual calculations informed by the company's current operations.
Other improvements include the automation of the booking process partly. According to Krajweski et al. (2010), companies that deal with service delivery enjoy automation only to a certain level. It is crucial to retain the human element in service delivery. Automation ensures that the customers can book their consultation sessions online and only come to the shop to get their super relaxante. The benefit of this enhancement is that smaller queues are smaller; hence, the services flow faster (Leite & Vieira, 2015). Less time wasted asking for the client's history as a video conference already ascertained the customer's condition. Critics might argue that this approach reduces customer-client contact hence severely affecting customer satisfaction levels. Therefore the company still has to hire more than two employees per establishment to allow flexibility and increase in the speed of attending to customers. (Krajewski et al., 2010). Also, the company could use an external trainer to access the varying needs of the employees. The CEO says that there is a difference in service delivery between different employees. It is worrying because they underwent the same training. An external trainer might offer a solution to the impasse.
References
Krajewski, L. J., Malhotra, M. K., Ritzman, L. P., Malhotra, M. K., & Ritzman, L. P. (2010). Operations management: Processes and supply chains . Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson.
Leite, H. D. R., & Vieira, G. E. (2015). Lean philosophy and its applications in the service industry: a review of the current knowledge. Production , 25 (3), 529-541.
