Enhancing the guest experience at Our Daily Bread

This report evaluates the issue of long guest wait times at Our Daily Bread Food and Resource Center (ODB) and proposes solutions by analyzing both the operational processes of the shopping sessions and the physical layout of the facility. Addressing this problem is critical to ensuring that Our Daily Bread can continue to serve its guests with dignity and respect. Our Daily Bread is a grocery store-style food pantry that allows guests to choose groceries for their households. They offer three shopping sessions per week and one on the third Saturday of each month, each of which is two and a half hours long. Originally established in 2017 with the goal of serving 200 to 300 households per month, Our Daily Bread now serves approximately 1,400 households per month. As the number of guests per session has increased, so have wait times. This has led to scenarios where guests are waiting upwards of two hours to enter the shopping floor. The goal of this project is to reduce the total time a guest spends at Our Daily Bread to under one hour—divided into a maximum of 30 minutes waiting and 30 minutes shopping. To achieve this goal, we focused on two main areas: process and layout. For the process, we developed a system to collect guest wait time data, conducted data collection, analyzed the results using Excel and Python, and built a simulation model in Simio to test the effects of various parameters. For the layout, we created an as-is diagram of the facility, collaborated with the client to develop a relationship diagram, and applied systematic layout planning to produce three potential configurations. For the process, we recommend adding one session per week, reducing session duration to two hours, and increasing the number of shopping carts to 25. Using our simulation, we found that implementing these changes reduce wait time by 38%. For the layout, we recommend implementing a cost-effective design that effectively utilizes ODB’s newly-acquired space, that further separates the guest and volunteer entrances, and that brings administrative spaces closer together. Using systematic layout planning, we developed three potential layout alternatives.