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Report: Individual Assignment (Benihana) Florian Hörl
1. Introduction
Benihana’s story in the US started in 1964 with the opening of the first restaurant in New York.
Only eight years later, in 1972, the company had opened a total of 15 restaurant units in the US
with a gross revenue over $12 mio per year (case, p.1). In the following, we want to give an
overview on how Benihana’s process design contributed to this immense success and elaborate
in depth how the process design supports the overall Benihana business strategy. The main
focus of this report is put on the operative processes. Additionally, the supporting processes
will be discussed briefly.
2. Business strategy and the operative restaurant process
After having analyzed the US restaurant industry for several years, Rocky, the founder of
Benihana found that Americans enjoy eating in exotic surroundings, were deeply mistrustful
of exotic foods and very much enjoy watching their food being prepared (case, p.1). He wanted
to change the way Americans think about Japanese food and introduce hibachi cooking to the
whole country (case, p.17). Furthermore, he identified several fundamental problems in the
restaurant industry, namely: high labor cost, limited seating capacity as well as high food
storage and food waste (case, p.2). Eliminating these problems in its own restaurant process
design in addition to creating a unique Japanese customer experience was key in Benihana’s
business strategy to win the US market. To answer the question how the operative processes
support this business strategy, we will walk through the process of serving a customer in a
Benihana restaurant. Figure 1 shows the BPMN diagram of the process flow of a Benihana
restaurant on a busy night. The diagram illuminates that parallel execution of process steps as
well as an overall efficient process flow of the customer experience are key factors supporting
