FOR COURSES IN:

Operations Management Service Management Strategy

Operations Management Simulation

BENIHANA V2

by W. Earl Sasser, Jr., Harvard Business School, and Ricardo Ernst, Georgetown University

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Version 2 UPDATED EDITION

Students explore the principles of operations and service management while working through a series of challenges set during a simulated evening at a busy Benihana restaurant. Customers start in the bar area for drinks and then move into the dining room where chefs prepare food right at the table. Each challenge allows students to uncover how aspects of the restaurant operation contribute to profitability. A final challenge

requires students to consider the lessons learned and design a strategy that maximizes utilization, throughput, and total profit for the evening. The second release of this single-player simulation retains the immersive experience of the original while enhancing the animation and analysis tools available to students and the debrief tools for instructors.

Operations Management Simulation: Benihana V2

hbsp.harvard.edu

An interactive animation shows the flow of customers from the bar into the dining room.

ADMINISTRATION TOOLS ON NEXT PAGE ➜

UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGES

The simulation has six challenges. The first five challenges allow students to explore individual principles of operations management related to demand variability and process variability. Customers arriving in the restaurant at varying times create demand variability while the variations in dining time for groups of customers creates process variability.

The first five challenges include:

■■ Batching dining room customers—Customers can be sent from the bar into the dining room in groups of eight or they can be seated based on the size of their party.

■■ Designing the optimal bar size—The bar is a source of revenue as well as a place for customers to wait until their table is ready. Changing the bar size also changes the capacity of the dining room.

■■ Reducing dining time—The chefs can be encouraged to alter the dining time during peak and off- peak periods.

■■ Boosting demand with promo-tions—Advertising campaigns, special promotions, and an earlier opening time can boost demand and prompt customers to dine at off-peak hours.

■■ Altering batching strategies at different times—Using different batching strategies for early customers, peak-period customers, and late customers can have different effects on utilization and profitability.

The sixth challenge asks students to consider the previous results to come up with the best overall restaurant strategy for maximizing profitability. Students must consider a balance between demand variability and process variability to achieve an optimal solution.

Students review data generated in each challenge to determine the drivers of profitability.

VIEWING RESTAURANT DATA AND ANIMATION

For each challenge, students choose options to explore and the simulation generates data for 20 runs representing 20 possible evenings at the restaurant. The dinner and drink costs in the simulation match the Benihana of Tokyo case study (#673057) to facilitate teaching the two together.

For any run, students can analyze the data or view animation of customer traffic through the restaurant. The animation helps students identify bottlenecks and better understand how customers flow through the bar into the dining room.

Customer service is available 8 am to 6 pm ET, Monday through FridayPhone: 1-800-545-7685 (1-617-783-7600 outside the U.S. and Canada)Fax: 617-783-7666Email: custserv@hbsp.harvard.eduWeb: hbsp.harvard.edu

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A comprehensive Teaching Note covers key learning objectives:

■■ Analyzing capacity, demand rates, cycle time, and throughput in a service operation

■■ Understanding how batching strategies improve throughput and how increasing capacity improves bottlenecks

■■ Minimizing or eliminating demand variability (cyclical, stochastic, batch size, and service time)

■■ Optimizing multiple variables in an operation and ensuring consistency in the overall strategy

FREE TRIAL ACCESSVisit hbsp.harvard.edu

A Free Trial allows full access to the entire simulation and is available to Premium Educators.

Premium Educator access is a free service for faculty at degree-granting institutions and allows access to Educator Copies, Teaching Notes, Free Trials, course planning tools, and special student pricing.

Product #7003 | Single-player | Seat Time: 90 minutes | Developed in partnership with Forio Online Simulations

Administration Tools for Faculty

Detailed class summary results allow faculty to discuss the results of each challenge with students.

ALSO AVAILABLEIN OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

New to this edition:

NEW Design—Updated visuals and enhanced animation allow students to systematically explore the elements of profitability at a service organization.

NEW Teaching Materials—An updated Teaching Note reduces the time required for faculty to learn the simulation.

NEW Dynamic Debrief Slides—Instructors can download presentation-ready debrief slides of class results including “best strategy” results.

NEW Simulation Status—Simulation status information can be viewed from within the instructor’s coursepack and from within the simulation itself. This includes whether the simulation is open to students and the number of runs allowed for the final challenge.

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