Amanda’s Restaurant Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Introduction

Company Background

Amanda’s Restaurant was initiated by Amanda West with an idea to run the business with social and environmental mission. The idea behind the business was basically to start a fast food restaurant that offered healthy food. Therefore, she positioned the restaurant with the emphasis on quality of products and services offered by the restaurant. The tagline for the fast food chain was “feel good fast food”. The fast food chain started in 2007 which had 26 locals and a General Manager to carry operations within Amanda Restaurant. The industry was quite a competitive one with all industry players operating on fewer profit margins and was rather keen on providing extra services to the customers.

Key Competitors

The key competitors for Amanda restaurant were the local fast food restaurants that were operating in the region. Although, they do not position themselves as healthy and nutritious but being part of the fast food industry they are serving as competitors of Amanda, these competing restaurants include: Chilly, KFC, McDonalds, Hardees, etc.

Financial Performance

The financial performance of Amanda was quite stable as the restaurant has been competing more than the expectations. Within the initial two years, Amanda did not take any salary which the restaurant hung onto excessive profits. The quality of food and the increasing number of customers had actually made Amanda look to explore the restaurant in new areas.

Problem Identification

The problem identified in the case is that although the restaurant has done more than the expectations in the first two months, but still there have been some problems which the management has faced during the initial phase. Restaurant needs to adjust the kitchen requirements and has to come up with improved inventory holding to improve the feedbacks of the customers as well which have been hard during this period.

Analysis

The current situation of Amanda restaurant which is actually causing inventory holding problems, that is the stock outs and the kitchen requirements which in turn makes the customer give harsh and negative comments about the operations of the restaurant. Amanda West was concerned about the situation and wanted to make sure that the customer did not give any negative comments. She was keen to overcome the current issues of stock outs and kitchen requirements.

Order Rejection

The current order fulfillment process at Amanda restaurant was such that once the customer entered the restaurant, the waiter took the order from customer who had selected a specific dish or combo from the menu. Once he wrote down the order, the waiter took the order to kitchen where the chef noted the order and analyzed the ingredients required to complete the job which was to serve the order to the customer. After taking a look at the order, he went straight to the inventory control room where the chef had to look for the inventory required to fulfill the order requirements (Chase, 2007). Over here, the chef was guided by the control room in charge to inform about the specific raw material required to complete customer order. This was a normal procedure at Amanda restaurant. Now the in charge was responsible to provide the necessary material, spices, meat, vegetables and all other things that would be used in completing the job on hand which was to serve the customer requirement. If he did not find the required ingredient to fulfill the customer order then he informed the kitchen management about the shortage of required or the necessary ingredient or raw material and informed the waiter about rejection of the customer order. Then waiter went back to the customer and informed him that the order could not be made as the inventory was short and requested him to order something else. The whole process of identifying the inventory position made the customer wait for more than 5 to 6 minutes which made him frustrated and in the end the customer gave the feedback to the restaurant with rude and harsh comments because his request was turned down while taking too much of time (Ninemeier, 2006). The table explained in appendix is an assumed break-up of time which explained the time required to reject the order of the customer.

Start Cooking

The above scenario explained the dissatisfaction or the extra time customer waited just to know in the end that the order could not be completed and delivered because the restaurant was short of inventory and out of stock. This made the customer frustrated and made him give rude feedback to the management. However, the other situation was when the customer was delivered with the order requested by him or her. In this situation the process of operations was similar, over here customer looked at the menu and selected a specific dish and ordered it to the waiter (Chase, 2007). Then the waiter wrote down the order and took it back to the kitchen where the chef went to the inventory control room to inform the inventory supervisor about the specific ingredients, raw materials, spices, meat, vegetables, etc. that will be required in completing the order posted by the customer. Once the inventory was collected by the supervisor, he rolled back................

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