Hard Rock Cafés Operations Management and Productivity

Fact of the case

The case deals with Hard Rock café, the modest pub in London, which has grown exponentially with additional 110 cafes, 3 hotels, music venues, casinos, etc within a very short span of 30 years. The present situation of Hard Rock is that it has been classified in the service industry category, 75% of people in this organization are from the US. As the pub was rated as the service industry they shifted the HQ to Florida and established 40 branches across the US.

In the US the tourist destinations provide 3500 meals per day and hire around 400 employees. The working atmosphere, style of preparation etc are much sophisticated and the quality is found to be at a premium level. The growth of the pub to the supreme service industry will be a lesson for similar organizations.

The 10 decisions of operations management are applied at Hard Rock Café:

The operations management is the process which merges and renovates numerous resources used in the operations and production subsystem of the industry into value added services as per the organizations regulations. Operation management is also relevant in the manufacturing of the certain items were known as production management.

The ten strategic decisions of the Hard Rock includes the designing of the goods and services, quality management, process strategy, location strategy, layout strategy, Human resource and personnel management, supply chain management, inventory management ,time scheduling and the maintenance (Ten critical decisions, n.d).

Strategic decision contributes to the designing of the services applicable. The plan has been designed to serve 3500 meals per day and 1500 seating at a time, with highly customized meals provided by the chefs. This has been done a result of the analysis and assessment, and the review of every day menu. The quality management aspects include reputed brands of the restaurant and the presence in 40 countries since its establishment in 1971. The quality is an important feature for each of the chefs and the waiters in the restaurant. To maintain quality and innovativeness food research and the supplier research are conducted. The quality scores are estimated and the score of Hard Rock is found to be 7 usually. The process and the capacity design include 100,000 meals with various items like the starters, salads, desserts, burgers and other items which are highly customized.

The location is a significant part which can make the business plan as the whole prosper or otherwise. It is the long term decision which acts as a catalyst for the profitable business and the location has a world wide concern on the risk like the political, financial and social aspects. The location found for Hard Rock is always in major towns and cities in the US which contributes to advantages in the business.

The layout design of the Hard Rock is very good, and attaches the importance to the retail sector of the operations. The lay out design focuses on appearances, which add to the profitability in the organization. The management of the firm always recruits eligible waiters and chefs to identify fresh and quality meals and they are much concerned about serving the right meal to the right person with consideration of quality and time.

The inventory management of the organization finds the stock rating of the food and the merchandise. It consists of the renewal of the cafes around the city and the catalogued amount seems to be $40 million. The scheduling include the consideration for sales, sales for business priority, motive, reputation , increased profitability, sales trend in the monthly and annual periods and the sales forecast.

The human resource includes people who are the assets of the firm. The HR strength of the company is around 400 people in the restaurant itself and they are given all the service industry benefits. The maintenance of the firm deals with the maintenance as the controlling level to maintain the business with the same reputation throughout. The maintenance reports the quality is the key to success and they include the analysis by the reviewing of the menus, survey, equipment and the standards in the pubs, retail sector and in maintenance of the each store in all 40 locations.

How would you determine the productivity of the kitchen staff and wait staff at Hard Rock?

Productivity = Value / Time

(productivity equals value divided by time)

By this definition there are two primary ways of increasing productivity:

Increase the value created
Decrease the time required to create that value (Pavlina, 2009, para.1).

The productivity is the relationships that constitute the output and the services to the input, which include the resource consumed in a business system. Your productivity formula will allow you to handle those pesky interruptions as they arise, while staying on track with your target project. This will result in higher productivity and performance (Roberts & Kosmicki, n.d, para.1).

The productivity of the kitchen staff can be estimated by the formulae: