The Operation Management of Foreign Food Restaurant

Operations Management is the study which will help you to deals with the design and management of products, processes, services and supply chains.  As customers, have you ever wonder the reason why you go to the particular restaurant or fast food.  There might be plenty of reasons regarding this choice, but I’m sure there is no such thing likes coincidence because weather you realize it or not a restaurant has at least one reason to attract the customer.

In the order to have better understanding about this case, I did a research to find out the reason of why costumers go to certain restaurant. For the start, first of all I make an appointment with the manager of the restaurant, after that ask some questions that I have prepared before and the last thing to do is to order a special menu.

            The first question is about how the location was selected and why is it important to the restaurant. For this answer I don’t think this is one of the manager businesses because he just simply replied “I don’t know”. Same as the second question about how did this restaurant decide of how many tables and the people per table were needed, he just replied, “I don’t know”. Finally for the third question I have a good answer. The question was do you track your volume? And do you operate differently when you have a rush of people or when there are just few people He replied, “Yes, because this is important to know the busiest day to put more workers at that time and we never put fewer worker on the ship”. The next question is the question to know the performance of the restaurant.  The first question was how they determine how much inventory to keep on hand and what items are the hardest to control, what are the biggest challenge in the inventory control and if the wastage is a problem or not. In this restaurant, to determine how much inventory to keep on hand, there is a minimum quantity of the items, if the items quantity lowers than minimum the manager request it to the supplier. The biggest challenge of this restaurant inventory is because some of the items are import and it may not come on time, so what is on the menu sometimes is not available.

The next question is about how this restaurant schedules their workers and what different levels of worker do they have. The scheduling of the worker was not hard because this restaurant just employ full time worker, so the employees work from 11:00 a.m. till 09:30 p.m. there is three four type of worker, first is the manager and also the cashier, second is the waiters, third is cleaning services and the last one is the chefs. The next question is about the manger performance. The first question is how they try to improve the process of preparing food (this could be form a speed, process of quality point of view. When I ask this question the manager say it is the quality but he was not sure about it, because people come to this restaurant not because the speed, process or the quality but more because we serve special food. The last question of this research was what the biggest challenge of managing this restaurant. It take some time to the manger for answer this question and I can’t take one of the biggest challenge other than the fact that sometime the food is not available and I have to explain to the costumer so many times.

After all these questions that I addressed to the manager of a restaurant I conclude that to be a manager of the restaurant is not an easy job but also not as hard as I thought. Even though this man is the manager and a cashier at the same time, he never feel have a hard time to do both job at the same time all day long from Monday through Friday. One more thing that I learnt from this restaurant is about, to attract customers a restaurant may need speed, process or the quality for what they serve but not limited to those three points of view. This restaurant for example, they are not emphasizing on the speed, process or the quality to attract the customer, but this restaurant is emphasizing on the uniqueness of the products. So, I assume that this restaurant target market is costumer who curious about certain food of this restaurant, not just random people who pay for no reason. So, it proves my theory which is “weather you realize it or not a restaurant has at least one reason to attract the customer.”