The business problem
Luna inherited a small bakery from her grandmother and grew it into three locations — Downtown, Riverside, and a new Airport Kiosk. Business is booming and quality is collapsing. Defects are up, waste is up, customer complaints are up, and nobody knows the real cost of any of it. There's no shared inventory system, no SPC, no DMAIC discipline.
Your job, in three acts: (1) Diagnose using the Seven Tools and a DMAIC cycle. (2) Control by setting up statistical process control on the highest-defect line. (3) Scale by proposing an ERP architecture that connects the three locations.
Why this is the canonical case
It's the only case that spans Part 1 (process), Part 2 (planning & inventory), and Part 3 (quality + ERP). Work it after you've done at least Decisions 2, 5, 6, and 7.
Case kit
Everything you need
- The Midnight Bakery — Part 1 (docx)The full DMAIC story. Read this first.
- The Midnight Bakery — Part 1 (interactive)Same story, browser-friendly with inline concept spotlights.
- The Midnight Bakery — Part 2: The Night Watchers (docx)Control charts and Cp/Cpk through narrative.
- The Midnight Bakery — Part 2 (interactive)SPC explored interactively.
- Luna's Bakery Goes Digital — ERP & IoT (docx)Act 3: scale the operation with an integrated system.
- Luna's Bakery Goes Digital (interactive story)Browser-friendly story with concept spotlights.
- Luna's Bakery Goes Digital (game)Roll out an ERP module-by-module and see what happens.
- Bakery Process Analysis WorksheetQuantify the bake-line bottleneck. Companion to Part 1.
- SPC Start File (SnackCraft template)Build the X-bar/R chart for Luna's croissant line. Same template, different product.
- Quality Data Matching — StarterMatch the bakery defects to the right tool from the Seven.
Deliverable
A one-slide recommendation to Luna with three pieces:
- What's broken — the top defect, its Pareto share, and the root cause from your fishbone.
- What you'd install — the SPC chart, the alarm rule, who watches it.
- What you'd integrate — one ERP module to start with, and why that one first.
Defend each in plain English. Luna isn't an operations major.
Topics you'll be applying
- Decision 2 — Bottlenecks · find the binding step on the bake line
- Decision 6 — Quality & SPC · DMAIC + SPC are the core technique
- Decision 7 — Scheduling & ERP · the scale-up half of the case