All Posts Tagged With: "BEI"
Really Fast Food
Pal's Sudden Service
Pal’s Sudden Service is one of my favorite Baldrige stories. The only restaurant to receive the Baldrige Award (2001), Pal’s is a small fast-food chain headquartered in Kingsport, Tennessee, that boasts world-class performance:
- Service speeds four times faster than its competitors
- Order accuracy at least ten times better than its closest competitor
- Employee turnover half the industry average
- Customers who come back 3-4 times per week compared to 3-4 times per month for its competitors
- Same store sales and market share that have grown for the past 24 years
A great article on SunHerald.com traces the evolution of Pal’s from a single store selling 12-cent mini-hamburgers to a beacon for best practices. The company formed Pal’s Business Excellence Institute (BEI) in 2000 to share its operational ideas with other organizations and a bunch have jumped at the chance, including hospitals, school systems, law firms, charities, churches, and more than 50 nonprofits and government agencies. Ken Schiller, head of a barbeque restaurant in Texas, brings his management staff to BEI every year. “Coming to Pal’s allowed us to know where the bar can be set,” he said. “It gave us a benchmark that we otherwise wouldn’t have even known was possible.”
In the article, David McClaskey, who…
18Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
