Customers often add cookies, potato chips and other items during this time of the transaction, further adding to delays and time constraints. The three avenues that the Sub-Shop could rely on for attaining higher levels of profitability include streamlining the throughput and production process, reducing operating expenses, and initiating a just-in-time inventory strategy to minimize inventory carrying costs while increasing freshness of ingredients. When all three constraints are optimized, customer satisfaction often rapidly increases as well. For the Sub-Shop, choosing just one of these three avenues would tend to cause a level of dissatisfaction and potential defection from customers over time. What is needed is a coordinated approach to unify all three of these elements together into a consistent, synchronized strategy. Profits of the Sub-Shop would increase because customers would be getting higher quality sandwiches, made more accurately to their unique requests, with fresher ingredients. Profits would increase significantly over time as a result.

The five focusing steps for the Sub-Shop would begin identifying the constraint of the queue line. This constraint could be exploited by adding in several queues, each with specific sandwich makers who would work in parallel with each other. This would significantly reduce the bottleneck of the customer queue....

By alleviating the dependence on just a single queue, the Sub-Sop would be able to exploit the constraint and create higher levels of customer satisfaction. Third, the decision to better manage the queue by concentrating on making multiple lanes to reduce the time loss and impatience of customers waiting to order. Fourth, the queue could be elevated and further managed so efficiently that the Sub-Shop received a reputation for being one of the best-run in the area with the freshest ingredients and best food. All of the constraints could then be specifically be used for creating the highest levels of customer satisfaction of any Sub-Shop in the area. The following is a reality tree of the Sub-Shop's operation.