Analysis of Alternative Approaches to Chipotle Mexican Grill’s Service System Using Discrete Event Simulation

Chipotle Mexican Grill is a fast causal restaurant chain headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Founded in 1993, they now have over 1,700 locations across America, as well as internationally. Although the “integrity” of their food is a fundamental part of their business strategy, according to both of their co-CEO’s, throughput is also a key factor of focus. The most recent upgrade to the service system of Chipotle is their “Four Pillars of Great Throughput” strategy. In short, it simply addresses capacity of workers and preparedness. Without even modifying the core of their system, the results from this initiative have shown great success. However, based on my own experiences and observations, there are several weaknesses still to be improved upon. To explore potential improvements in service system throughput, as well as customer WIP and cycle time, I use AnyLogic simulation modeling software to construct a discrete event model of Chipotle’s current service system, as well as two proposed alternative systems of my own. The 1st alternative system tackles two key weaknesses of Chipotle’s current system simultaneously, which are as follows:

1. The customer ordering procedure causes significant delay in total system processing time.

2. All operations occur sequentially, leaving no flexibility to alleviate weakness.

To learn avout the 2nd system, follow the link below to read the full paper.

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