We started our digital transformation project by understanding the frustration of customers of Julia’s: long waiting times. During our research we developed a suggested solution for this problem.
Firstly, we examined the internal and external environment of Julia’s. Here we found that the competitive advantage of Julia’s lies in the handmade, authentic and healthy food they provide, but the average waiting times are quite high when comparing them to other options to have dinner at railway stations.
One of the important goals of Julia’s is that the preparation of a pasta should not take more than four minutes. Taking into account this important goal we defined four key success factors (KSF). We defined the key success factors as punctuality (KSF 1), consequent quality of products (KSF 2), customer satisfaction (KSF 3) and distinguish from competition (KSF 4).
First of all, the investment in the application will turn profitable if an increase in customers is achieved. The pasta bars of Julia’s have to change the organization within each bar so that there is a fast and convenient way to pick up the online ordered food by the users of the application.
Long waiting lines will disappear as customers are now able to pre-order their meal so that they do not have to wait in line. By reducing the waiting time, the punctuality will be higher. Julia’s will provide handmade, fresh and authentic fast food, which will grow their competitive advantage and distinguish from competitors by being fast and offer a decent, warm and healthy meal. Finally, the reduced waiting time and the guaranteed quality of products will lead to a high customer satisfaction what leads to more sales of products and makes the investment profitable.
A limitation of the application could lie in the problem that customers are not on time for picking up their meal, caused by a delay of the train. To prevent this problem, we would suggest to implement the Julia’s online ordering application into the NS application, as the NS application provides information regarding all of the train delays. This information could help to see the delays coming and would prevent the food from being too long in the heating system. Another limitation of the application could be that there is not enough capacity at the Julia’s pasta bars. We suggest to reorganize the pasta bars to become more efficient and larger to ensure all of the demand of customers.
In the end we could say that the online ordering application would turn out to be a profitable investment and we therefore suggest to implement the application as soon as possible. We also would like to mention the possibility to implement the application within all the formulas of NS retail when the application works smoothly and when the customer satisfaction will increase.
