PROBLEM STATEMENT
The expected increase in the number of customers visiting their restaurant each day had made it a very busy and populated place. Making it even more complex and difficult for the management to handle and cope with the increasing visitors. This had lead them to contemplate regarding increasing the number of people working for them in their restaurant, which they thought should be equally capable of handling and serving well, as losing a customer would turn out to be negative for the restaurant in the long run and days to come.
ANALYSIS
Sunset Grill being renowned and a big success in itself have built up many expectations from the people as well as the owners. Therefore Melhuish has to put all possible efforts to cope up with the situation and run it in the most efficient manner. Sunset has huge fan following and with it comes the responsibilities also, responsibility of serving the people in a right manner, doing justice with them in every condition, keeping up the profound faith in the franchise, ensuring that one must not let down the name in any way and most importantly maintaining the name, the fan following and the taste which is famous all around. Accordingly Sunset has most of the crowd on weekdays and that is the reason why it is becoming unmanageable on those days as it doesn't have sufficient seat ability
Plans by the management to further grow:
- Runner- To decrease the burden on the servers the management had planned to introduce a runner for the work of serving the tables which were left out/not attended properly by the servers, as they were too inundated by the demands of their own tables and because of this reason they were unable to deliver food to the other tables. The extra one runner to the staff allowed the servers to work with more efficiency and eased down their work. Runners were people the restaurant hired on part time basis and gave them $10 per hour which scheduled them to work the entire weekend shift as it was the most crowded.
- Menu boards- The restaurant authority considered adding a 6-meter * 2.5-metre menu board above the concept kitchen. The reason behind this was that it was more easily visible to the patrons waiting in the queue and could easily decide as to what they wish to order while waiting in the queue itself, which the franchisors believed would reduce the time to place an order by 10 minutes. Even they thought about introducing either an electronic menu board or a physical menu board, either of them was necessary to be placed as they reduced time to place an order.
- Substitution Effect- The restaurant also thought about changing its no substitution policy. Since, it would increase the burden on the kitchen. As they thought, that more than good it did bad to the restaurant, hence they decided to ponder upon the total time they would have to dedicate to each item in order to include substituting an item in the list, which they found out to be just an increase of 1-minute in the existing 5 minutes of time taken to deliver the order, which wasn't a great task/draw-back as it would prove beneficial for the restaurants image as a whole.
- Winter capacity- Also, to accommodate more and more people they thought of converting 16 seats across four tables into five horizontal benches that would be able to accommodate a total of 25 people which would be easier for accommodation of large number of people. And, also planned to introduce heaters which would heat 10 seats and would cost $700.
- Reduce Menu Items- Since some of the items took a longer time to be served which slowed sown the kitchen process and efficiency, so they thought of removing the Sunset Burger and Salads as these were the items which took longest to prepare. But this was a temporary fix and was not to be considered long term problems.
CONCLUSION
A good restaurant works on the most basic principle that is; serve good food and offer great customer services. But sadly Sunset Grill is not vigorously working on the second part although they have many plans which are quiet good also but they do not have any plan for implementation and that is the basic need for them at this point of time. They highly need to invest on services as they serve very delicious food undoubtedly but the mark where they lack is customer service that isn't perfect as it ought to be. For them, if they won't start working on the issue right away things will get worsened and may be more pathetic. Below are some suggestions that Melhuish must look upon, as they would surely help him to meet up the two ends and embrace the franchise.
- Make proper and effective guidelines and work upon them strongly and implementation should be the most worked upon factor as we plan many things in our mind but their practical implementation is what that lacks behind and therefore none of our plans gets justification.
- Make your team and employees work harder but with equipment's. One needs inventory equipment's to work in more efficient way so that they can increase the internal productivity.
- Most importantly there isn't any fast fix to any problem none of the issues can be fixed over nightly. So one needs to work upon harder but with the same amount of patience.
- Each and every day the service should endowed not only weekends but make it an everyday practice as it should come under daily routine to serve in a more better manner.
- Hire people who possess a heart of hospitality and happy nature, people who don't get irritated easily , people who know how to talk politely in every situation, people who can please others and more importantly who themselves don't get angry easily .
- Make a proper training plan for each and every employee even for yourself also and a get a regular feedback of how strongly are you working on it and keep a definite check on it.
- Reward your team for great performance. Do same behavior with them which you want them to do to your customers.
- Lastly, inspire your team to work for the beneficence of the customers.
Attachment:- 910D15-PDF-ENG.PDF