…and say hello to Cappuccino in a Cloud.
The Red Hat “Boston” office just moved into new diggs down the street from our old office space. This is the second move we have made since I got here four years ago and a needed one as the company continues to grow at a steady pace. Inevitably the discussion of coffee makers comes up every time we make a move (and quite frequently in the interim too) with a new coffee gadget showing up shortly after. We opted for the Flavia drink station this time around. This brings up the issue that any new gadget presented to a large audience will inevitably see high traffic for the first few days before the novelty wears off and the traffic reduces to a steady level of consumers.
There are many questions that need to be considered here. Will the machine stand up to the first few weeks of abuse? If it was engineered for a high peak capacity is it still economical to run when that traffic has fallen off? Do we just accept that the first few weeks will see some breakdowns, pissed customers who will not come back because of the failed experience and keep on chugging with the knowledge that our initial costs were low? If coffee making could be parallelized could it scale up and down economically and efficiently?
This is the Cappuccino in a Cloud problem. How do you make processes efficient and scalable for both high load peak and the inevitable lower day to day traffic? The travelling salesman problem dealt with efficiencies of one single entity (the salesman) finding the most efficient (read cheapest) single threaded route through a number of destinations. In today’s word the consumer comes to the buisness or service, sometimes all at once, and it is important to figure out the most efficient way (measured in the consumer’s satisfaction and producer’s bottom line) to handle that load.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
Assuming the higher-end coffee maker indeed takes significantly more cost in the long-run when there’s less use, the solution is to buy several of the lower-end coffee makers. Spread the load across them and they’ll keep working with reduced individual load. Once the surge has ended, sell the redundant makers and reclaim some of the cost.
Comment by Joseph — May 5, 2008 @ 1:12 pm
Coffee-in-the-office is a Hard Problem(tm). Things that make it hard:
- Number of people who want coffee — the load problem you describe.
- (Lack of) knowledgeability in operating the machines. Who refills the thing? What if they do it improperly? Who cleans the machines? I’m appalled at all the “pod”-type machines and their incredible amounts of discarded, non-compostable packaging that the pods generate. This sucks because they *are* the easiest to operate.
- Pickiness among the coffee lovers. You have the “coffee is coffee” crowd, all the way up to the people who refuse to drink anything below latte art. “Federico, you know how to work the espresso machine, so please make me a capuccino” just doesn’t scale. Predictably, Federico will probably refuse to drink some shitty drip coffee prepared by a random person
When I used to visit the Novell Boston office, I was this close -)(- to buying one of those small, electric moka pots. I could have had good coffee for myself, and it would have enough capacity so that sharing an ocassional cup with a coworker wouldn’t be a problem.
Maybe the solution is for small teams to share a medium-sized coffee machine, and have $experienced_teammate operate it, but just so that that wouldn’t be a job by itself
Comment by Federico Mena-Quintero — May 5, 2008 @ 1:20 pm
The flavia coffee/flavor/etc dispensers are unbelievably wasteful. Each one is individually wrapped and contained and I don’t believe they make those items in a recyclable plastic. At least they didn’t the last time I saw one.
Comment by seth vidal — May 5, 2008 @ 10:10 pm