Sample case study: the taco shop and the catering orders in three places

The business

A taco shop with eight employees, a counter, and a growing catering side. The owner, whom we'll call Rosa, takes catering orders for offices and parties.

The problem

Catering orders reached Rosa three ways: phone calls, texts, and emails. She wrote phone orders on whatever was nearby. Texts stayed in her phone. Emails stayed in her inbox. On Fridays she sat down with all three and retyped everything into a notebook, which the kitchen then used to plan the next week's prep.

In this example, the retyping took about an hour. Twice in one month an order got missed, and one customer showed up to find nothing ready. That was the part that hurt.

When the helper interviewed the staff, nobody had mentioned the notebook as a problem. It was just how Friday went. The cook brought it up when asked what fell through the cracks.

What got built

One thing, in about a day.

1. A shared spreadsheet called "Catering Orders," with one row per order: customer, phone, date, head count, what they ordered, deposit paid, and notes
2. A short form that writes into that sheet, so Rosa or anyone at the counter could enter an order from a phone in about a minute
3. A "This week" tab that shows only the next seven days, sorted by date, which the kitchen prints on Fridays

No new accounts. The shop already used Google Workspace. The form is the one new thing anyone had to learn.

The helper also wrote a half-page on how it works, and taped a copy by the kitchen printer.

What went wrong

The first version asked for fourteen fields. Nobody filled in all of them, so people went back to scribbling on paper and entering it "later." The helper cut it to seven fields. Anything else went in a notes box.

The kitchen printout also had the columns in the wrong order for the way the cooks read it. That took ten minutes to fix once a cook pointed it out, which only happened because someone asked them to look at it.

And Rosa kept answering texts and then forgetting to enter them. A rule that helped: "If it's not in the sheet, it's not an order." Sticky, a bit harsh, and it worked.

What changed

In this sample, three things.

• The Friday hour of retyping went away, because orders were already in one place
• The kitchen could see next week's orders on Monday instead of Friday afternoon
• No orders were missed in the following months

Those results are illustrative. In a real project you'd count: hours saved, missed orders before and after, and anything that got worse. A fix isn't a win until you've checked.

What this sample leaves out

A real write-up would include things this one can't: the real hours, what it cost, who pushed back, and whether it lasted six months later. We'd also say what the project didn't fix. Rosa still took phone orders at the busiest part of the lunch rush, and the sheet didn't change that.

What to take from it

The fix wasn't clever. A sheet and a form. The value was in seeing the Friday ritual for what it was, which only happened because someone sat in the shop and asked. The first-week guide covers that part.