In this single-player simulation, students explore the principles of operations and service management while working through a series of challenges set during a single evening at a busy Benihana restaurant. Customers start in the bar area for drinks and then move into the dining room where chefs prepare the food right at the table. Each simulation challenge examines a particular aspect of the restaurant operation beginning with the effect of batching customers from the bar into the dining room. Other challenges examine the effect of redesigning the bar area, reducing dining time, and boosting demand through advertising and special promotions. The final challenge requires students to consider the lessons learned in the previous challenges to design a strategy that maximizes utilization, throughput, and total profit for the evening. The simulation is designed to expand on the learning objectives of the Benihana of Tokyo case study (#673057). The second release of this popular simulation provides students with enhanced animation tools for exploring the challenges of running a service operation and provides faculty with streamlined tools for conducting an effective debrief.
Company: Harvard Business Publishing
Approximate price: $15.00
Playtime: 2 hours
Learning objectives: Analyze capacity, demand rates, cycle time, and throughput in a service operation.
Understand how batching strategies improve throughput and how increasing capacity improves bottlenecks.
Optimize capacity in an operation.
Minimize or eliminate demand variability (cyclical, stochastic, batch size, and service time).
Optimize multiple variables in an operation and ensure consistency in the overall strategy.
Link to simulation home page: https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/7003-HTM-ENG?Ntt=Operations%20Management%20Simulation%3A%20Benihana%20V2