The Subway Effect

By Chris on August 6th, 2010

If you’ve ever been to Subway you know the ritual well. You approach the counter, pick your meat, your bread, your cheese, choose toasted or non toasted.

Now if you choose non toasted then you might not know this next part, but if you chose toasted you’ll find this next part familiar.

Your sub gets picked up and brought behind the counter and placed in the toaster.

Here is where it gets cool.

As soon as the toaster goes ding to signal that the sub is properly toasted there is almost a swarm of employees willing to remove the toasted sub from the oven. No matter what the employees are doing, if they are close to the oven when it goes off they will drop everything to help out. 

Since the first time I noticed this I’ve wondered why Subway employees are trained to do this. So after years of careful observation and a few thousand calories (with 6 grams of fat or less) the answer became clear. Subway relies on providing speedy service in order to make a profit. Throughout the entire sub makking process, the oven has the greatest potential of creating a bottleneck. Which is why employees are trained to work together to prevent this specific bottleneck from happening.

At Netgen, one of our clients were experiencing a similar bottleneck, although their problem stemmed from their e-commerce capabilities. This company wanted to sell their product online, but customers were getting frustrated with the checkout process and leaving their carts without finishing their purchase. We recognized this bottleneck and incorporated an e-commerce platform by a company called Shopify into the website. Their e-commerce platform alleviated customers frustrations with the checkout process which lead to more sales and higher customer satisfaction. By identifying the problem and searching out a company that knew how to solve this particular bottleneck we were able to successfully serve our client.

This is what I like to call the Subway effect.

Every industry has one, or multiple bottlenecks somewhere in their business and it’s important to take the time to analyze business practices in order to find these bottlenecks. Only after these bottlenecks are identified can you find the solution to eliminate them. So do you know where your bottlenecks are? If so, are you taking the necessary steps to eliminate them?