LAND OF PROCEDURES

Now, I have been a few times to ThattuKada Shish, I am pretty impressed with the procedures followed there.

Let us analyse the scenario.

A customer comes in. The customer goes to an empty seat. Shish, at the cash table, ever alert, shouts to the waiter.

‘Hey, there… waiter….’

The waiter would appear with a small note book in hand and a pencil kept over his ear, would go straight to the new customer and start reciting,

‘idli, plain dosa, masala dosa, uttappam, medu vada, daal vada, upma……’

By this time the customer would have selected what he wanted. Most of them come already decided to consume the TKS special dosas.

‘one TKS special…..’ before the customer completes his order, the waiter would echo it to the kitchen. ‘One special dosa…. Anything else, sir?’ this to the customer.’tea, coffee, milk, TKS special rasam….?’

‘tea…. A strong cup…..’ The waiter would echo that too….’  He writes it down in his note book.

The customer gets his dosa and tea in a matter of minutes; the waiter writes the bill in a piece of paper and gives to the customer. The customer pays the cash to the waiter, adding a small tip.

If the waiter is busy with another customer, say customer B, customer A need not wait for the waiter to come back but can move on. As customer A nears the cash desk, the waiter would shout, ‘table no 3, 10 Rupees….’ Then customer A pays and exit. If he wants a bill, he can collect it at the desk.

Compare it with a posh hi-fi restaurant which I visited the other day. As you enter a board welcomes you with the announcement that it is self-service. As the customer goes in he has to go to the cash counter and stand in a queue. He can check the menu card when he reaches the counter and order the dosa and tea there. The person sitting at the counter will input the order to the computer and produce a bill from the nearby printer. You pay the cash and take the bill which is in two parts. Then you go to another counter and stand in the queue. The task is to give one part of the bill to the person at that counter. Then he will advise you to find a seat and wait.

After waiting for some time, (the time is directly proportional to the status of the restaurant. The higher the status, the longer the wait) the person at the counter will shout the number on top of the bill. Then you can go and collect your food, bring it with you to the table and eat. Some places will have a small device on which that bill number will be displayed when the food is ready. 

It is because all the different food items ordered by different customers will take different times to prepare, some shorter, some longer – the customer gets a seat to sit and wait. Otherwise the customer would have had to wait in a queue at the third counter too!

Actually, it is not only in restaurants, the procedures are laid out. Suppose you want to purchase something in a company. The normal procedure in most of the cases will be, you make a written request in triplicate to the store. Store will check if it is available there and if not, they will pass on the request to head of administration who in turn approve the purchase and send to purchase department. The purchase department will get three quotations and make a comparative statement and send to administration for approval of vendor and the price. After this approval, a purchase order will be made and given to the supplier.

Now, this is a straight-forward purchase. If there are some queries at any stage, for example, if the stores find that the person wants a 16 A fuse but the stores has only 50 A fuse. So, he can ask back, why don’t you use 50 A fuse? Similarly, if there is any query, from any stage, it has to go through the whole procedure again. Finally when the purchase dept is ready to place the order, the price may have increased. So you go through the procedure of getting approval again.

So what? Yes, procedures cause some delays which is normally taken for granted. That is why, even we have a phrase called procedural delays.

Even when we visit big temples, there are procedures and queues to get a darshan, to get prasadam, to offer any special puja etc.

I do not know how TKS is going to work when there are too many customers. I think Shish will have to lay out some procedures then.