Summary:
The Beaver Dam was a student-run on-campus café at Huron University in London, Ontario. Coined as Huron’s living room since it was established in 2010, The Beaver Dam continued to follow the mission of “serving up student-friendly prices and legendary signature drinks.” The Beaver Dam was open Monday to Friday from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, and was known for its variety of specialty drinks, such as espresso-based offerings and matcha. Facing the increasing demand of specialty iced drinks, the strain of current operations was evident. Danny Ojeda, manager of The Beaver Dam, needed to implement a solution quickly. Alternatives included investing in an automatic espresso machine, batch producing matcha or hiring an additional barista during rush hours. Students are asked to perform a process identification, process analysis and trade-off analysis. They will conduct financial analysis to determine the production capacity and conduct financial analysis to evaluate improvement options. The operational management case is designed for an introductory business course at the undergraduate level.
The Beaver Dam: A Solution For When Demand Floods the Dam
Author: Richard S. Bloomfield and Cecilia Darling
Category:
Operations
Preamble:
This case was written with the support of research assistant Taylor Barrett, and was edited by Joe Gilvesy and Katie Oates. Final production of this note was made possible by Ryan Rabie from the Library and Learning Services team at Huron University. The authors' intent for this material is to be used in a classroom or other management learning settings. Names or other identifying information may be altered to protect confidentiality.
Published 07-07-2026
Copyright:
This content is freely available without charge to readers and their institutions. All content is published under the Creative Commons License, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Readers are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of this case without seeking prior permission from the author(s)
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