Improvement Insights Blog
Taco Bell One-Piece Flow
My local Taco Bell uses one-piece flow, but is it working for customers?
“I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“You know, in Lean we talk about the idea of “One Piece Flow”: You have one thing and it gets all the way through the process. I noticed this in action at my local Taco Bell, and I think it may not be the best way to go about it.
“When you come in, if you place an order at the drive-through window, if there’s somebody in front of you they fill that order before they take your order. Well, that collapses the time between when [they] took the order and when [they] provided it, which makes their metrics look better, right? But all of us in the queue are sitting there [wondering], “When are they going to take my order?”
“So then [they] take [your] order, then you go down there, you pay and you get the thing. I think that’s highly inefficient. One Piece Flow can be used inappropriately, so let’s just think about how we’re going to do this and not bend the metric so that we look better. One Piece Flow is great unless you misuse it to make yourself look better.
“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s go out and improve something.”
