McDaniel\'s Burger Restaurant is a family owned restaurant in the Southwestern p
ID: 432742 • Letter: M
Question
McDaniel's Burger Restaurant is a family owned restaurant in the Southwestern part of the United States. It is located in a small town in Texas. The family has had the restaurant for three generations. People come from far and wide to eat at the restaurant, because they take pride in cooking each burger to the customer's wants and needs. The restaurant prides itself in having the most selections for meat and vegetarian burgers. In addition, they carry a wide variety of toppings such as ordinary toppings like tomatoes, bacon, cheese, onions, lettuce, but also unique toppings like cucumbers, salsa, salad dressing, pincapple, and sprouts. Customers can decide on how they would like their burger cooked: grilled or fried. Everyone in town loves McDaniel's Burgers because they are personalized and delicious. Lately, business has been increasing because the population has increased. The McDaniel family can longer keep up with the demand and decide to sell their business to a bigger firm, the Burger Business. Burger Business has many establishments and is used to catering to large crowds. Burger Business executives liked McDaniel's burgers but felt that it was not very efficient, because customers would have to wait a long time before their order was completed. Over time, the executives and consultants of Burger Business felt that they needed to have five different stations. The first station was for meat selection. For instance, the customer can choose their meet selection of: beef, bison, elk, chicken, veggie patty, etc. The second station was for meat preparation. The customer can choose if they want their meat fried or grilled and to what degree. The third station was for toppings on the burger. An attendant would help the customer with the toppings for their burger. The fourth station was the side bar, where customers could choose what sides such as drinks and French fries with their burger. The last station was the cashier, where customers would pay for their meal. Most of the employees of McDaniel's Burgers were already trained in all areas of operations. Hence, they could work in any station and in any order. The Burger Business executives felt that this would help with employee satisfaction because they could work in a variety of stations and they could have more flexible However, over time, the profits for McDaniel's Burgers were not very high. Moreover, employee retention was at an all time high. However, executives felt they could replace workers, because the task was so simple. In addition, several customers did not prefer dining past. More customers were requesting to take home their because they felt they made producti in the restaurant as in the orders. The executives were con ve and efficient changes. Initially, the executives felt that the reason customers felt negatively about the business was because there were certain stations that tended to have longer lines, such as the toppings and sides bar. Hence, they divided the toppings stations into original toppings and unique toppings. In addition, they divided the sides bar into fries and drinks. The executives also decided to get rid of toppings that customers rarely ordered such as anchovies and sauerkraut. Overall, the executives were happy with the changes they made and felt that they could open more McDaniel's Burgers in other locations.Explanation / Answer
1. Yes, I think that there is a good future prospect for this business. This is possible by providing a good training to all the employees. The team can be further sub divided into different teams and can be trained to increase the familiarity of the work. The only challenge is to cater the demand of the public, which is possible by hiring more number of employees.
Since, the demand is good, business sees a good increase in sales and this is possible by opening a chain of the restaurant by forecasting the demand in different areas in the town. Also, people are ready to carry the burger which means that there is not a requirement of bigger space in the restaurant. Hence, the cost can be cut down in taking the land and building a restaurant. The price can be then taken out by doing all the calculation and adding the desired mark up on the overall cost.
Some of the potential risk can be forecasting and demand mismatch while also the effect of lost sales. Hence, a proper mechanism needs to be followed to take care of this. Also, the cost part need to be taken care to get a proper profit percentage.
The motivation to the workers can be a good pay as well as the enjoyment at work. So, the workers should be given a good training to learn how to act while serving people and may be this can be linked with the bonuses and incentives.
2. The case study talks about “made to order” kind of business which means the customers are getting a personalised burger i.e. the one desired by them. The advantage is customer satisfaction while the disadvantage is that it is time taking and involves a lot of cost as there are involvement of different stakeholders for preparing a single burger.
3. First, as a communication consultant I would capture and look at the sales figure and the demand. I will try to check if the sales are lost because of the unavailability of the material or employee. These figures will help the executive to come up with a better forecast of the demand so that it can satisfied with the help of the supply or employee base whichever is lacking in the restaurant. The data collected can be passed to the executives telling them the lost sales and reason behind it. The capability that can be added upon and then the business can be flourished in the long run.
4. As a customer I would like a dedicated person for me to prepare the burger rather than going to the different workers for different thing. In this way there would be a single point of contact to me and there are less confusions that can occur. This is possible by training each of the workers with all kinds of work, so that they can prepare a burger dedicatedly and the payment counter can be different. The only dislike with the current arrangement is involvement of so many workers for preparation of a single burger which is also increasing the time taken.