Idea #33: Dosa and Phad Thai Outings

Today I ate at 2 of my (used to be until now) favourite eat outs and was utterly disappointed and dismayed with the deterioration in quality of the food and general standards of these 2 places.

First was morning breakfast at Vidyarthi Bhavan. Personally I abhor people who say anything against the Vidyarthi Bhavan Dosa, it’s a sacrilege in my dictionary. Such is my devotion to the legendary Dosa that they have been dishing out since several decades.

But alas today even I was dismayed by the steep decline in taste and quality. The chutney had become little sour, there was hardly any salt in it and portions of the Dosa was under cooked. Vidyarthi Bhavan has never been known for its idli but today’s idli was especially bad, the coffee was too sweet and the poori crumbled like a papad. It was bad, bad and bad all the way and I told this to Mr. Adiga’s son who was at the cash counter. He did sound a bit surprised but I was surprised that he was only surprised and not shocked and shaken by the feedback, but I do hope he will take the feedback seriously and do something with it. After all I won’t stop eating at Vidyarthi Bhavan based on today’s experience. Nobody’s perfect and everyone deserves a second chance!

Evening I went along with friends to Magnolia, again a personal favourite amongst the Thai restaurants in Bangalore. But it had been quite a while since I had visited them and in fact they have changed from the original location to a new place in Kormangala. Boy oh Boy, it seemed that with the new location everything has changed. I don’t know if they have got the Vaastu of the kitchen wrong or something but the food was badd, to put it mildly. The coconut milk soup which I used to love seemed like a new being that I could not even recognise. The appetizer, main course and everything else that followed was disappointing one after the other and overall we left pretty disappointed.

I don’t know if I have become a better cook or they have become worst but the two outings today left much to be desired.

Quality, more than anything is about consistency, more so in food business!

Idea #5: Slick Sigma

Slick Sigma is a highly customised, event specific Six Sigma methodology.

Traditionally Six Sigma projects go through all aspects of DMAIC for mostly academic and documentation value and not necessarily for sustained positive changes. Most often Six Sigma projects result in immediate benefits but over time these benefits either plateau out or deteriorate.

Another problem with traditional Six Sigma is that it spends too much time on Define and Analyze phase and not as much on Implement and Control phases. This normally happens due to slacking initial enthusiasm and weak management attention to these phases.

Slick Sigma over comes these problems of the traditional method by making Six Sigma a practical day to day tool and does not confine it to academic value and limit it to certain groups of people only.

The key phrases of Slick Sigma are,

• Implement once, Sustain forever
• Significantly reduce total project time
• Measure all phases based on value and impact and not effort