If there was one article you could ask your students to read at the beginning of the OM semester, it would be this lead piece 
in Businessweek (May 9,2011). The theme is that OM innovations at fast food restaurants like Taco Bell rival those at any factory in the world. Written from the view of the drive-thru window (which generates about 70% of fast food sales), the article lets you overview your course with issues of productivity (Ch.1), technology and process design in services (Ch.7), layout (Ch.9), and time & motion studies (Ch.10). The story also comes with a 1-1/2 minute video which the students will enjoy as well.
Here is a quote from the 5-page reading: “Go into the kitchen of a Taco Bell today, and you’ll find a strong counter argument to any notion that the US has lost its manufacturing edge. Every Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who overseas 3 dozen workers, devices schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product”.
The firm’s CEO concludes, “At Taco Bell today I’ve got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day”.
Adds a former Wendy’s VP for OM, “The most advanced operational thinking in the world is going on in the back” of a fast food restaurant. Wendy’s is rated as the fastest brand (an amazing 134 seconds per drive-thru vehicle), but Taco Bell comes out 1st ranked overall with an average time of 164 seconds and a 93.1% accuracy rate.
This article describes the restaurant layout (the topic of our Global Company Profile in Ch.9), new technologies in the industry, bottlenecks, staffing issues, and much more. It is a perfect lead-in to the exciting topic we teach.