Papa Johns is the third-largest pizza delivery chain in the world. It makes all its own dough out of massive quality-control centers. While those centers have largely been automated, Papa Johns didn't touch the in-store pizza-making process. That is, until 2020. During high-pressure pizza days like Super Bowl Sunday, the company found a pain point: Stretching the dough by hand took too long. So the Atlanta test kitchen stepped in to develop a dough spinner that takes 13 seconds of make-time. Now, it's in 75% of North American stores. We went behind the scenes with Papa Johns six days before the Super Bowl to see how all this new tech is faring during crunch time.
Ordinarily, I'd put this in my Microeconomic board but I'm going to pop it here: it deals with production methods, economies of scale and innovation, and so is equally applicable to here. It shows how mechanisation allows Papa Johns to produce its dough balls and might get you thinking about its costs of production relative to their final sales price.
However, equally, you might also think about motivation - do you think that working on the dough ball production line lends itself to having motivated employees? So how might you go about motivating them? What techniques and what motivation theories could you apply?