Cafe and Cloud Kitchen Operations Study

Added Jul 2026 3 design docs

A neighbourhood café and a delivery-only cloud kitchen can sell the same sandwich at the same price and end the month with completely different bank balances. One pays rent for twenty-four seats and a barista who is idle from three to six in the afternoon; the other pays a commission on every order and lives or dies by how fast food leaves the counter after a rider arrives. Owners of both feel the pressure daily, yet almost none of them have ever timed an order, costed a recipe, or worked out which menu items quietly lose money on every sale.

The intern runs a comparative operations study of two fictional small food businesses, a twenty-four seat café called Kettle and Crumb and a delivery-only kitchen called Tandoor Tales, using observation rather than opinion. That means six timed site visits with a stopwatch log of forty orders from placement to service, activity sampling of what staff actually do minute by minute, a five-day wastage tally, a hundred public delivery-app reviews coded into complaint categories, a menu engineering matrix in excel that sorts twelve items by popularity and contribution margin, a peak-hour capacity model that names the bottleneck station, three swimlane process maps drawn in canva, and a pack of standard operating procedures written in google-docs.

The project teaches the core toolkit of operations management: process mapping, cycle-time analysis, bottleneck thinking, contribution margin, capacity planning, and turning messy observation into a costed recommendation an owner can act on this week. Operations, supply chain, retail, and quick-service roles all interview on exactly this ground, and a study that names a bottleneck and quantifies the fix reads far stronger than a summer spent shadowing a manager.

Related projects

Small Business Digital Transformation Roadmap

Walk into any old market lane in Delhi and you will find shops that have survived twenty years on trust, credit, and memory. The khata notebook holds who owes what, the stock count lives in the owner's head, UPI payments arrive but nobody reconciles them, and the shop has no listing at all when a customer three streets away searches for it. These businesses are not against technology; they have simply never been given a plan that fits a four-person shop with no spare time and no software budget, so every attempt starts with an app nobody opens by week three. The intern builds that plan for Sunrise Hardware and Paints, a fictional 22-year-old shop in Karol Bagh with four staff, about 70 walk-ins a day, and roughly ₹1.1 crore of annual sales. The work starts with a digital maturity assessment scoring eight capability areas from level 0 to level 4, then turns the gaps into a 12-month roadmap of three waves, each initiative written up as a one-page card with its rupee cost, staff owner, weekly time cost, and payback in months. Supporting it are a cost-benefit workbook in google-sheets, a tool comparison shortlist, a starter presence pack for the shop's Google listing and instagram feed designed in canva with two posts in Hindi, staff SOPs for three daily routines, and an owner briefing deck. Three consented shopkeeper interviews, digital audits of five comparable shops, and a 30-customer tally survey keep the plan grounded. The intern finishes with the core consulting skill set: assess a current state honestly, size the gap, sequence the fixes by payback rather than by novelty, and write it so a busy owner can act on Monday. Digital transformation, business analyst, and operations consulting roles all run on exactly this cycle, and a roadmap that respects a ₹25,000 first-year budget shows far more commercial judgement than a deck full of buzzwords.

managementcanvagoogle-docsgoogle-sheets+1

PRD · HLD · LLD includedView

BusinessMedium

Crisis Management Case Study and Response Playbook

A single phone video can now cost an Indian consumer brand more in a weekend than a bad quarter ever did. Someone films a foreign object in a snack packet on a Friday night, the clip crosses fifty thousand views before the company's first shift arrives on Monday, food-safety officials in two states take note because they saw it on their own timelines, and distributors start holding orders while the head office is still deciding whether to reply at all. The damage is rarely caused by the incident itself; it is caused by the silent hours, the defensive legal wording, and the fact that nobody had decided in advance who speaks first. The intern works on both halves of that problem for Anandam Foods, a fictional Indore namkeen brand selling across six states. Half one is a forensic case study: an hour-by-hour reconstruction of a 96-hour crisis, a stakeholder map, an analysis of five decision points where the company chose badly, a damage assessment, and a counterfactual first six hours, all benchmarked against three publicly documented consumer-brand crises read through news archives and coded for media tone in google-sheets. Half two turns those findings into a working response playbook: four severity levels with numeric triggers, a crisis team chart with named backups, a 90-minute first-response checklist, eight pre-approved holding statements tested on 30 respondents, a social response matrix, a hostile-question media brief, and a 90-minute tabletop simulation with timed injects, written in google-docs and packaged with canva and powerpoint. This is how corporate communications, public affairs, and risk teams actually work: study what went wrong, then convert each finding into a rule someone can follow at 2 am. The intern finishes with a portfolio piece that proves judgement under pressure, source discipline, and the rare ability to write calm words for a bad day, which is exactly what agency and in-house communications interviews probe for.

managementcanvagoogle-docsgoogle-sheets+1

PRD · HLD · LLD includedView

BusinessEasy

Inventory Management Study for a Local Retailer

The neighbourhood grocery store is one of the most efficient businesses in India and one of the least measured. A shopkeeper carrying twelve hundred items knows in his head which brand of atta moves fastest, but not how much money is sleeping on the top shelf in packets nobody has bought since Diwali, and not how often a customer walks out because the one shampoo sachet she wanted was missing. Both losses are invisible, both are large, and both can be fixed with nothing more than a notebook, a few weeks of counting, and the arithmetic that big retail chains run every night. The intern conducts a full inventory management study of a fictional 900 square foot self-service store called Sunrise Supermart. That means building an SKU master for sixty tracked items across four categories, keeping a twenty-one day movement log, auditing shelf gaps twice a day to measure stockouts, running a short exit survey of thirty shoppers in google-forms on what they could not find, classifying every tracked item by sales value and demand variability in excel, computing reorder points, safety stock, and economic order quantities from real supplier lead times, valuing the dead stock, and writing a one-page bilingual reorder policy card in google-docs that a shopkeeper could pin beside the till and use tomorrow. The project builds exactly the analytical muscle retail, supply chain, and category management roles hire for: demand measurement, ABC and XYZ classification, safety stock logic, order quantity trade-offs, and the discipline of turning three weeks of counting into a policy someone will actually follow. A study that names the rupees tied up in dead stock and the sales lost to empty shelves is a portfolio piece that survives any interview question about whether you can work with real operating data.

managementexcelgoogle-docsgoogle-forms

PRD · HLD · LLD includedView