Estimating Skills of Waiting Staff of a Restaurant based on Behavior Sensing and POS Data Analysis: A Case Study in a Japanese Cuisine Restaurant

Abstract

An approach to estimate skills of waiting staff of a restaurant by using the human-behavior sensing and POS (point-of-sales) data is proposed. Understanding skills of employees is important in every industry but it is difficult because there are no standard to evaluate their skills. In this paper, we describe experiment results of the support of a QC (quality control) circle of a restaurant. We observed behavior of waiting staff and visualized them to members of the QC circle. Members found that there was a difference on their workload by watching trajectories of waiting staff. For improving their process, they decided the main theme of the QC as “keep positions”. They decided actions to achieve the theme that consist of following: (1) stay longer in the dining area, (2) reduce the movement, and (3) keep their positions. We evaluated these actions using several metrics based on the behavior-sensing and POS data analysis and confirmed that actions (2) and (3) were achieved. Based on these results, we argue skills of waiting staff.

Keywords: Human-behavior analysis, POS data analysis, skill estimation, QC circle, service process improvement

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe100284