Operations Performance in Cumadre Hamburgueria

1. Executive Summary

Remain in the restaurant market proved to be a difficult task worldwide. According to Brazilian Society of Bars and Restaurants (ABRASEL) around 30% of new business closes on the first year and 50% will fail within the first two years.

Therefore, it is important to use techniques and analysis that will help prevent owners to fall into this statistic.

The analysis will include an overview of the operations performance in Cumadre Hamburger, located in Ouro Preto, Brazil. For this report to be done, the structure of the company was well investigated and studied. It identify performance objectives of the company and analysis of four V’s. Further, order winners and qualifiers were established. A Balance Score Card was created to facilitate this performance study.

Finally, it was provided some recommendations to improve quality and speed, as they were identified as order winners. Furthermore, it was recommended that the company invest in flexibility, which was identified as a powerful tool to increase customer and brand value.

1. Introduction

The idea of the Cumadre Hamburger company began to be developed in December 2010 by two partners and was founded on June 8 of 2011. It is an option for burgers in the historic city of Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

The city was considered one of UNESCO World Heritage in 1980 by its beautiful baroque architecture and stunning landscapes. According to a survey made by the Secretary of Tourism and Culture of Ouro Preto, the number of tourists per month is around 70,000. This number reaches a peak of 200,000 people during the Winter Festival on July. Furthermore, one of the main reasons of the restaurant success is due to the fact that Ouro Preto is an university city. The student population based in the city is 10,190 people.  

Therefore, we can observe that the city has a growing demand on catering. Cumadre Hamburger is located on an excellent spot, near the university, attracting the majority of its clientele, the students.

The CUMADRE name was created with reference to Cumpadres and Cumadres expression, and also refers to that which cares for the student republics of the city of Ouro Preto. Result of a field research, interviews and suggestions based on Ouro Preto republics.

The burgers are handcrafted with selected and grilled meats, accompanied by fries or onions rings, drink of your choice and cookie option. Beyond the option of visiting the site and eat in, the customer can also order the food by phone and receive it in the comfort of their houses. For the second choice, it is charged a little amount of delivery tax.

It was made an investigation on performance objectives of the company to define which are the most important to operation’s administration. Identification of levels of four v’s to focus on the right strategy. Definition of order winners and order qualifiers in order to focus on essential requisites.

This report is aimed to the Cumadre Hamburgueria’s senior management team. Showing some failures in the company’s performance, it intends to raise questions about the organisation work, put them into discussion and provide recommendations.

1. Operations management

Operations Management is the activity responsible of administering all the process that results in a good or service provided by the organization. It evolves the whole manufacturing since the pre-production and purchase of raw materials through the manufacturing of the product to its final delivery to the consumer.

It is an important section of a company, as it deals with most part of the production process of a good or service, therefore impacting directly on costs.

The person responsible for this part of the company is often called operation manager. It has been argued (Slack 2013) that its main functions are under four headings: direct, design, deliver and develop.

 

-This professional has a deep knowledge of the operations and processes involved in the good or service offered to the costumer. He directs all the strategies the company is planning to reach the client, in a general way, bringing them into reality.

-The operations and processes have, in a certain way, a manner of being shaped, becoming easier to put them in practice. Designing is to create a model of these operations considering the services and products the organisation offers.

-Delivering concerns with reception of raw materials from suppliers, its conduction through the operation and the distribution of the finished product to the customer.

-Developing process performance is critical to the survival of the company within the market. It is expected from the manager and mainly from the company, innovation and continuous improvement of the operation process and performance.

1. Performance objectives

The success of an operations manager work depends not only on delivering projects on time or increasing the company profits. It is good to remember that the organisation carries the brand name with itself and it has to always improve its value. With that purpose in mind, there are some performance objectives recommended to be followed by companies. These goals can be grouped together as quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost.

4.1 Quality

Quality is difficult to define, as it has different meaning for each person. However, we will adopt the concept that quality is the ability to produce according to the specification of the client, without error or failures. There are various quality tools that are used to measure and compare characteristics of services and products. For example, Pareto Chart, Ishikawa Diagram, Histogram, Check Sheet, Control

Chart and among others. They are helpful in troubleshooting issues related to quality.

For the restaurant, we will use the Ishikawa Diagram, also called Cause-and-Effect Diagram, to represent the possible causes of the delivery delay of orders.

The Ishikawa diagram, also known as fishbone diagram due to its analogy to a fish skeleton, is used as one of the seven basic tools for quality improvement around

the world, but was founded in Japan by Kaoru Ishikawa in 1968. Its purpose is to list the possible causes of an unwanted feature that would influence the quality of the product/service.