May 15, 1998

Pizza 73 takes a slice of U of A business talent

Left to right: Chris Neuman, Guy Goodwin president, Pizza 73 and Chris Goodwin

Guy Goodwin doesn't want to keep a hungry pizza eater waiting. When somebody calls for a Pizza 73 order, they want to be connected to an operator, and fast. "First and foremost, .we want to be properly staffed. If we're understaffed, we anger people. Overstaffed, and it costs money," says the president of the successful pizza delivery outfit.

That's one of the reasons his son, Chris Goodwin, proposed a group project at Pizza 73 for their 426 course last winter. The Faculty of Business student, along with students Jay Baraniecki, Ada Chan and Laura Morrison came up with a scheduling program using Excel that took into consideration the slow periods (mornings) and busier periods (evenings). So, the senior Goodwin welcomed the students into the call centre on Jasper Ave. and let them do their thing.

"At first, it was overwhelming. We wanted to get something theoretical on paper," says Chris. "I really wanted to get a good mark in the class because it really wouldn't take a finished working program to get a good mark," he laughs. As it turns out, the program was very much applicable to the operation.

"We use it on a weekly basis, " says Guy Goodwin, the boss.

Also from the Faculty of Business was a co-op stint at Pizza 73 that looked at a distribution problem. That was tackled by Chris Neuman and Mark Jaffray. They looked at the delivery boundaries of the eight pizza outlets in the city and how they are adjusted to accommodate new stores.

"We grabbed two weeks of sales and aggregated the information into a census track (a database with map) overlay. We're left with 157 census tracks for Edmonton and each had the sales values. Then we transferred it to Microsoft Excel," says Neuman. The question they asked themselves: Can we assign these census tracks to stores to minimize the distance system?

What Pizza 73 usually does with a new owner is negotiate sales with the existing owner in the area to trade-off sales. It was a geographic distribution, not a sales one.

"It turns out, in the end, the existing set-up is pretty good," says Neuman. There wasn't a marked difference in sales to warrant a change, he says. "Change raises hackles."

At the prompting of their professors, Dr. Erhan Erkut and Dr. Armann Ingolfsson, who teach distribution and service operations management, three of the students rolled their project ideas into a paper, a notable feat for undergraduates. And it got the attention of the Canadian Operations Research Society: the paper won their student prize competition.

Chris Neuman, Laura Morrison and Jay Baraniecki presented their paper at a conference in Montreal last month.

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