Case Study: Large stainless steel rollout for a global food service restaurant
Project: Custom equipment design and manufacturing
The client
One of the largest quick-service hamburger restaurant chains in the world, with more than 6,700 restaurants in North America and international markets.
The challenge
To design, engineer, manufacture and install new equipment for the client’s rollout of new menu items — in an extremely short period of time.
With only an eight-week lead time, the client came to S&G with a list of new menu items and tasked us to provide design and engineer equipment solutions for preparing those items; solutions that also needed to fit into existing current kitchen layouts. S&G then needed to manufacture enough of this equipment to cover 6,000 existing client stores.
And finally, our solutions needed to work for each of the client’s 20 building layouts.
The S&G solution
S&G leveraged our integrated team process and brought everyone necessary to the table. As a group, we developed a solution that served not only the functional food preparation needs, but also had the versatility to fit every building layout. Our solution involved manufacturing stainless equipment that could be hung on the wall, mounted underneath a shelf, or free standing. In designing a single solution that served all purposes, S&G was able to reduce manufacturing time as well as costs. It also ensured that S&G would meet the short deadline without having to survey each location for their specific need.
S&G’s comprehensive ability allowed us to develop and brainstorm a solution, design it, and manufacture it all within the customer’s critical path. By using S&G — instead of three disparate companies — for the full project, the client was able to accelerate the process and simplify communication by giving every store one source for making these menu items a reality.
The result
The new products launched without a hitch. And the client was very pleased with S&G on many levels. S&G not only met the client’s deadline, we finished delivering one week ahead of schedule — enabling them to keep their marketing and advertising schedule on track, which was a critical business requirement.
Our solution had such a positive impact on function, cost and mass production, that we are currently looking at other rollout initiatives to help the client speed marketing ideas to their stores.