A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF FOOD COURT ANALYTICS
Open Access
- Area of Honors:
- Industrial Engineering
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Soundar R T Kumara, Thesis Supervisor
- Dr Paul Griffin, Honors Advisor
- Keywords:
- data mining
- food court analytics
- Restaurant analytics
- Abstract:
- Abstract Analytics is being used everywhere now a days, this is mainly because of many commercially available software packages that can be embedded on the current database and ease of use to create reports and dashboards. But this has not reached the full potential in the food industry. There is a lot of information collected by the restaurants on the customers and their purchases, but no comprehensive way to analyze them. There is a lot of literature on how to do analysis for similar kind of transaction information. And in this thesis we shall see how these can be used in the context of food courts. Information is critical for making decisions and communication of this information is harder as the attention span of people has been reduced due to the speed with which the world is rotating now. Thus newer approaches like dashboards in data visualization are used to convey large amount of information in a short window. In this thesis we shall see how the food court management can monitor the customer, employees and the restaurants with one simple dashboard. We shall discuss an optimization model that will create an optimal schedule for employees so that they are used only during their most productive hours. Next we shall rank the restaurants based on sales, number of visitors and number of revisits to see how each restaurant is doing compared to others. Two other analyses is on customer summary to find out insights about the customers and association rule mining to see the rules for items being bought together. This information can be used to make recommendations like the customers should be recommended how much to refill the card so that they can avoid entering the queue for multiple refills, the customers can be suggested new items that they might be interested in based on their previous purchases and the management can use the association rules to make marketing strategies and generate coupons. The employee schedule can be implemented to make sure the employees are not over worked and they are at the peak of their performance to serve the customers to the best of their ability.