Benihana Simulation Case Study

The Benihana simulation allows you to become the ultimate decision maker with many of the large aspects of the restaurant. The simulation forces you to think about the size of the bar and seating area, whether or not you will batch the patrons, how quickly you would like to get your patrons in and out of the restaurant, how much money you should spend on advertising and how to spend that money. I think this simulation was a great way to help one focus on how to optimize the factors involved in making a final decision and how each decision impacts the other.

The best strategy I came up with resulted in the highest total revenue, despite having a lower nightly profit than other options. This strategy batched the restaurant patrons in groups of eight from open to 7pm and 7pm to 8pm. From 8pm to 10:30pm, patrons were batched in groups of four to eight. This strategy helped keep customers in the bar longer in the earlier hours, resulting in increased drinks revenues. Not batching customers decreases the efficiency of the restaurant, thus decreasing overall revenues. Batching allows customers to take advantage of the bar while waiting for enough people to form a group of eight, increasing drink and overall revenues.

The next decision made was to determine the number of seats at the bar and the number of tables in the seating area. I decided to go with a bar that contained 71 seats and a seating area with 12 tables. This also encourages customers to experience the bar comfortably while waiting to be seated. This may also increase the likelihood of customers that only come to the restaurant to for the bar experience. To further increase drink revenue, I decided to spend 3x the advertising budget to have a Happy Hour period with a restaurant opening time of 5:00pm. It is widely known in the restaurant/bar industry that drinks have a large profit margin. By encouraging this Happy Hour period, the restaurant will experience excellent sales in both the dinner and bar revenue. Though the restaurant sees a loss in customers later in the evening, the restaurant still sees an overall benefit as a result.

I decided that during the period from the opening of the restaurant to 7:00pm, the average dining time would be 50 minutes. This allows the early customers a few extra minutes to wind down from work, but also be able to take advantage of the Happy Hour. The period from 7:00pm to 8:00pm has a shorter dining time of 45 minutes. This is one of the periods that typically sees the most dinner traffic, and allows the restaurant to turn over as many tables as possible, increasing dinner revenues. The customers who wish to take advantage of the Happy Hour period may also want to spend additional time in the bar and this would be the time that they would come into the restaurant. The later period would see a dining time of 60 minutes. Keeping these customers in the restaurant longer may result in will likely aid in increasing dinner revenues.

These strategy results in nearly 600 drinks served and almost 400 dinners served each night, while only losing about