In early 2019, Alan Jay, an executive in the Quality, Safety and Risk Management (QSRM) department of Gloria Hospital, a full-service hospital that specialised in children and women healthcare, had been requested to gather insights and seek improvements to the pre-consultation waits at the hospital's Children's Emergency (CE) department. After an initial study, minor schedule adjustments were put into place, with many shifts starting one hour in advance to reduce snowballing of patients awaiting consultation. However, post-implementation data suggested that the patient load to capacity ratios remained uneven across each day of the week. Subsequently, a team of operations professors and students were assembled to join Jay in a second phase of the Children's Emergency Consultation Queue (CECQ) project, started April 2019, to better understand the actual waiting time of patients at the CE.

John Chow, the owner of Café Betterfield (CBF), is a food gourmet and a passionate entrepreneur. CBF offers a wide spread of food options, and this was a big draw for many of its regular customers. With these strengths, Chow was puzzled by the lacklustre and irregular profitability of the cafe. Mandy Lim, the newly-hired manager of CBF, was tasked to investigate and find solutions to the current problems.