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GA 284 | Continuous Improvement in the Fast Food Industry with David Reid

Avatar photo By Jessica Bush Updated on September 11th, 2019

This week’s guest is David Reid. David is a Principal Team Leader at Chick-fil-A, and he shared some of the many ways they’ve incorporated lean into their day-to-day operations.  A MP3 audio version of this episode is available for download here.

In this episode you’ll learn: 

  • The quotes that inspire David (3:55)
  • Who Chick-fil-A is (5:20)
  • David’s background (11:09)
  • Chick-fil-A’s lean origin story (14:28)
  • How lean is being applied (17:15)
  • Their team facebook group (20:28)
  • The pull system for their lean training (24:01)
  • The sandbox concept (27:14)
  • A cool improvement example (31:51)
  • What David is excited about (37:01)

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What Do You Think?

What’s the best way to get employees engaged in the improvement process? How do you collect and sort through their ideas?


  1. Jack Day

    September 25, 2019 - 9:29 am
    Reply

    Great podcast, very informational on lean processes in the food service industry. Having worked in restaurants for most of my life, the ability to cut waiting times down and improve quality is no easy task especially across 2200 locations. I was impressed with the bottom up approach that all new workers go through a course on how to cut wastes, the podcast mentioned this is similar to a greenbelt in one day. I don’t agree that is the best comparison due to the amount of time and learning that goes into achieving a green belt but what these front line workers have improved is impressive. I found the statement that Chik-fila wants the right thing to do to be the easy thing to do was a great core goal, cutting complexity out of the the manufacturing process results in much less waste from human error. The use of the facebook group was genius for employees to share thoughts on processes improvement but management and filtering of the server is essential for such a server to keep Chik-fila in a good light. One question I had after listening to this podcast was has the lean workers at the “Hatch” crunched the numbers on how much money could be made if Chik-fila was open on Sundays? Hope to hear more podcasts like this and improving industries that have been around well before lean management systems.

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