Case Study: Air & Sea Kukai Restaurant
Background: the Problem
Kukai is an Air & Sea Restaurant. The Restaurant offers a menu range, including sea and bird foods. Kukai Restaurant’s vision is “to offer consumers with various eatable cuisines across all parts of the globe.” Last year, Kukai Restaurant had sufficient employees. However, this year, they have been operating with one waiter, one chef, and one bartender. Due to this, their employees have lost work morale, become dissatisfied, and are demotivated. Overall, customer service has become low. Customer loyalty and retention has become pathetic. These challenges have adversely impacted the Restaurant’s overall revenue. Over the last two (2) years, the Restaurant’s revenues have dropped from $3 to $2.8 million.
Service Design & Supply Chain Management
The Restaurant’s service design is challenging because of supply and clientele inconsistency, quality control issues, and market changes. This compels the Restaurant to continue to purchase a variety of food products in large quantities from the local vendors, which amounts to waste. The supply chain management (SCM) strategy would improve the Restaurant’s supply chain network (Reid & Sanders, 2016). This would work by monitoring customer arrival times and noting the popular menus/orders. This would enable Air & Sea to avoid guesswork hence become better-positioned to reduce wastages.
Quality Control – Food Waste
In the business of food supplies, quality control is critical. Lack of quality control amounts to food wastage. To reduce food waste in Air & Sea, the Restaurant should donate leftovers, reduce plastic use, recycle food, perform good inventory labelling, and uphold good inventory management (Reid & Sanders, 2016). For example, recycling vegetable oil for biofuels, inventory labelling, inventory management, and reducing plastics use would help them cut costs and raise profits.
Improving Capacity – Investment Scenarios
Air and Sea’s investment scenarios include setting a new menu theme, expanding Sunday and bar hours, reconfiguring tables and bar, and reconfiguring food storage area. However, based on the Restaurant’s situation, to improve capacity, the best investment option would be to raise menu prices. In this case, the best investment approach is to first raise the rates for the most popular menu items and see whether there would be a drop in the overall sales and then review the strategy based on the realized results (Ninemeier & Hayes, 2005). The other best option is expanding Sunday and bar hours; this would attract more customers, boosting its sales revenue. Compared to the other options, these two are more profitable and cost-efficient.
Facilities Layout
As per Air & Sea’s situation, cost-effective and simple approaches are required to improve its layout. For example, when the table size is lowered to 5 “by 3”, this will be a low-cost option for the Restaurant to improve its facilities layout….
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Work Systems & Inventory Management
Aggregate Planning, ERP, & MRP
By doubling demand in the three areas, the labor force would be doubled to waiters = 72; bartenders =….
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For Kukai Restaurant, MRP mimics much of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, often confusing the Restaurant over their use and application in their food operations (Torlak, Demir, & Budur, 2019). This project would enable the Restaurant to register greater investments necessary to create the required advancements to advance the Restaurant operations and lower the mistakes that have been being experienced with the old system it uses.
Resource Scheduling
The three employees, Hailey, Rebecca, and Antony, have various preferences as far as working hours are concerned. A schedule accommodating their different needs is thus required. The schedule is summarized below:
| Waiter | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Total |
| Hailey | 7-12 (5) | 15 | ||
| Rebecca | 5-12 (7) | 21 | ||
| Antony | 5-10 (5) | 15 |
Recommendations to Rescue the Restaurant
The top five (5) recommendations to improve Air & Sea’s operations management include: focusing on quality, consumer thinking, periodic monitoring or restaurant performance, improved forecasting, and taking a lean approach (Reid & Sanders, 2016).
- Focusing on quality: Would enable Air & Sea to improve inventory management and raise customer satisfaction levels.
- Consumer thinking: Would enable Air & Sea to recruit and train more employees to raise customer service level & satisfaction rates. It would also attract customer loyalty and retention.
- Improving forecasting: This will assist Air & Sea to prepare….Read More….
Implementation of Metrics
The acronym S.M.A.R.T abbreviates the Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely objectives of an organization. The top recommendation that Air & Sea should prioritize is “Focusing on Quality.”
| S | Specific |
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| M | Measurable |
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| A | Actionable |
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| R | Relevant |
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| T | Timely |
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References
Ninemeier, J. D., & Hayes, D. K. (2005). Restaurant Operations Management (1 ed.). Boston: Pearson. Retrieved 2020
Reid, R. D., & Sanders, N. R. (2016). Operations Management: An Integrated Approach (6th ed.). Wiley.
Torlak, G. N., Demir, A., & Budur, T. (2019). Impact of operations management strategies on customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions at café-restaurants. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 69(9), 1903-1924.