Once we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, there will remain a need for some level of social distancing in public places such as restaurants or at the very least an increase in automation for serving and billing. Writing in the International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling, a team from Japan has investigated how restaurants might best manage scheduling when staff are working alongside robotic counterparts.
Takashi Tanizaki of Kindai University, Takeshi Shimmura of Ritsumeikan University, Nobutada Fujii of Kobe University, and Antonio Oliveira Nzinga Rene of Toyama Prefectural University, explain that the use of robots in the workplace has increased in recent years. Robots can carry out the more mundane, or low-value-added, tasks that are perceived as too menial for staff. This also frees up employees to improve customer relations, boost return visits to an establishment, and even improve profit margins for the owners.
In all, the team suggests that balancing customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and management satisfaction may well be mutually exclusive to some degree. The team’s study has focused on finding a way to boost all three without any increase in one leading to a negative impact on the others.
“The simulation results show that increasing the utilisation of robots for low value-added work and hall staff for high value-added work with customer contact contributes to improvements in customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and management satisfaction in restaurants,” the team writes.
The question remains though…how much do you tip a robot?
Tanizaki, T., Shimmura, T., Fujii, N. and Rene, A.O.N. (2020) ‘Staff scheduling in restaurants where hall staff and robots cooperate’, Int. J. Simulation and Process Modelling, Vol. 15, No. 6, pp.571–583.