Answers should be in 4 decimal points

Problem 7. (14 points)

You are employed as an operations and quality assurance analyst at the Darden Restaurant Group’s Restaurant Support Center at Orlando, FL. Darden owns and operates more than 2000 restaurants in the United States, including the Red Lobster and Olive Garden chains. Information about Darden is available at Information about Darden’s Restaurant Support Center is available at

Your manager asked you to analyze customer complaint records and make recommendations to improve operations quality and increase customer satisfaction at an Olive Garden restaurant. At each restaurant, when a customer asks for a receipt, the wait staff brings the customer a blank feedback card along with the receipt. The wait staff encourages the customers to fill in the feedback cards before they leave. Most customers do not bother filling the card, but some take this as an opportunity to praise or complain about various aspects of their dining experience. The restaurant has sent the feedback cards filled by customers that dined in the restaurant in the past 4 weeks. An intern at the company copied the information provided by the customers to an Excel spreadsheet and has classified each complaint into one of several categories provided by your manager. You can see the Excel file on Blackboard named TC#2 Data. The data includes the complaints only. [1]

a) (8 points) The Pareto principle says that about 80% of operational problems are associated with only 20% of the causes. Prepare a Pareto Chart for the restaurant to show the number and frequency of quality related incidents by category. You can refer to and to learn how to prepare Pareto Charts on Excel. Add your Pareto Chart to your report as Figure-1 (see below).

In your Pareto Chart, the x-axis should show all categories of complaints. The primary y-axis must be the number of complaints. The primary series must be displayed as a column chart (bar chart). The columns display the categories in descending order of number of complaints (i.e, the tallest bar is the first and the shortest bar is the last displayed on the x-axis). The secondary y-axis must be the cumulative percentage of complaints (reported as percentages). The secondary series must be displayed as a line chart. These are the norms of a Pareto Chart.

Figure-1. Pareto chart of complaints

b)(2 points) Complete Table-1 below and report the top three most common categories of complaints at the restaurant. The analysis you conduct to complete the Pareto chart is sufficient to complete the table; the table provides more detailed information about the top three causes of complaints at the restaurant.

Rank (from most frequent to least frequent) / Category / No. of complaints / Frequency of incidents as a % of total / Cumulative % of incidents
1
2
3

Table-3. Top three most common quality-related incidents at the restaurant.

c)(4 points) Although the goal is to minimize and eliminate the complaints at this restaurant (and all others that belong to Darden), it is impossible to tackle all problems at the same time. It is too time consuming and expensive to ensure a 100% defect-free process. The restaurant wants to identify a few areas that would have the highest impact on quality. What are the types of problems that the restaurant should target first to increase customer satisfaction? What recommendations can you make to the company to focus their efforts to minimize the number of complaints? Be very specific about your recommendations (i.e. discuss what exactly needs to be done to prevent similar complaints in the future).

[1]The data is fictitious. This homework question and the associated data do not intend to promote or demote any restaurant owned or managed by the Darden Restaurant Group.