Café Dulce: Systems Redesign
USC Course ProjectCafé Dulce is a popular campus café with a familiar problem: peak-hour congestion, long wait times, and an ordering flow that creates bottlenecks at the counter. For a systems engineering team project, we treated the café like a production system, mapping the current state, identifying constraints, and redesigning the experience around throughput and clarity.
Beyond recommendations on paper, we also built a mobile order MVP to show how shifting demand off the physical line could cut congestion and give staff a cleaner queue to work from. The goal wasn't just a prettier layout, it was a measurable improvement to how people move through the space.
What we worked on
We broke the café into stages: arrival, order, payment, pickup, and seating, and studied where queues formed and why. From there, we proposed layout changes to reduce cross-traffic and make the pickup path clearer, then scoped a mobile ordering MVP so customers could place orders before they hit the counter.
The MVP was meant to prove the concept: fewer people standing still in the ordering zone, more predictable prep for staff, and a system that scales better during rush without requiring a full rebuild of the café.
Why it matters
This project was my first real introduction to applying systems thinking to something in the real world, and it genuinely changed how I see things. I can't walk into a store, a restaurant, or a car wash anymore without noticing the system running underneath it: where people bottleneck, how things flow, what's working and what isn't.
It's a small shift, but it's stuck with me. Good engineering isn't always about building something new. Sometimes it's about actually seeing the process people already live inside and making it work better.
Project visuals
From the peak-hour line outside Dulce to the causal loops, process flows, and redesigned layout that shaped our proposal.
Full report and demo
Want the full write-up or a walkthrough of the mobile ordering MVP? Both are linked below.