Background - Technical Report

To date, the Subway brand prides itself as one of the biggest sandwich chain located in more than 44,000 places all over the world (“The History of Subway,” n.d).

The current queue system of Subway outlets in Singapore focuses on a single- channel/single station queue system that can be further enhanced. A survey conducted by our team shows that out of 89 respondents, 53.93% of them are not willing to stand in line for more than six minutes. Customers are more likely to be deterred by long waiting lines, according to another survey in figure 1 (“Britons not willing to queue,” 2012). 59% of customers would rather choose the option of not queuing up at the store. Thus, these factors may cause Subway’s customers to look for food establishments nearby with shorter queue instead.

Figure 1. Survey of willingness to queue by (“Britons not willing to queue,” 2012)

One way to reduce the number of customers waiting in line is to adopt the use of mobile technology, and companies such as Starbucks and Pizza hut are successful examples of how using mobile technology can enhance the overall experience for their customers. Taylor (2016) states that Starbucks and Pizza hut are currently adopting the use of mobile technology to allow customers to make orders. She also states that in the current F&B context, many fast-food chains are looking in incorporating mobile ordering for customers. It is also stated in the article that Starbuck’s mobile application provides an ordering and reward program which attracts 12 million members up to date.

In addition, the number of F&B stores in Singapore that utilize digital technology such as self-ordering kiosks are on the rise which aids to tackle the issues for higher rise in cost for labour and low supply of manpower (Poh ,2015). She also states that Singapore McDonald’s self-service kiosks also aims to minimize long queues and to ensure the customers having a better dining experience. According to Poh (2015), Ms Carolyn Khui, director of e-commerce and customer relations of McDonald’s said “With the use of the digital technologies, the customers are now empowered to make their own orders, it improves accuracies for the customers, and at the same time, it actually cuts the queues you see at most of our counters.”

Therefore, it is clear that the number of fast food restaurants which implement the use of mobile application to order is constantly increasing. This further demonstrate that it is an effective approach which improves overall dining experience for customers. As such, it is beneficial for Subway to adopt the use of mobile application to stay competitive, and to leverage on the benefits of mobile technology to improve its customer’s overall dining experience at Subway.