Hard Rock Café - Operations Management in Services

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Based on customer profile research, more than 60% of Hard Rock Café customers are tourist as it considers that its location are tourist friendly. It has upside and downside though as it is susceptible to economic and tourist fluctuations nonetheless it has served its purpose over the years sustaining the business model and even has expanded. It is good to note if Hard Rock Café shall consider signing long term lease contracts to some of its slightly tourist locations in order to manage the risk on heavily reliant tourist locations.

- Layout Strategy:

Choice of the best location should be followed thru with a very good layout or look of the restaurant. This layout should support efficient flow of materials, people and information and beyond this should as well provide a good ambiance for customers to enjoy and stay and eat their food- the other half a good customer experience is “ambiance”.

Hard Rock maintained and sustained efficient kitchen layouts, motivated people, tight schedules and right ingredients at the right place at the right time. The memorabilia are perfectly displayed in areas that provides compatible lay out within the café. It does not show clutter or tight spaces where customers or waitress can’t comfortably move. Every piece of the experience including memorabilia, music, and paths are designed to show off the restaurant’s excellence look, legendary memorabilia, and expose customers to merchandise for sale. The retail shops generate almost half of the company’s profit and have detailed integration into the restaurant layout, flow and work stations. Hard Rock also consistently look into options whether to remodel, renovate existing site or acquire lands and construct new site. Regardless of the strategy, layout design is critical.

- Human Resources:

The continuous growth and expansion of Hard Rock Café entails that hiring should be on time and more important is hiring the right people. The need of cooks or chefs who understand American classic food, wait staff, merchandisers, bartenders, performers and support staff is on continuous basis whether to hire replacement or to hire for expansion. Human Resources comes into picture how to recruit, motivate, and retain personnel with the required talent and skills. People are an integral and expensive part of the total system design.

Hard Rock Employee are not only competent in their job skills but are also passionate in music, food and have engaging personalities. They use best people to recruit the best talent and have a continuous training and personality development for their staff.

- Supply Chain Management:

Hard Rock Café works only with the qualified suppliers to supply the right amount of goods ingredients on time in order to ensure fresh and quality meals. Right ingredients are purchased at the right time from the right and qualified supplier. Only the best quality are approved to be purchased and use in the preparation of the food. Hard Rock signed almost 8 months in advance to guarantee availability and freshness of its poultry and meat requirements. In its selling and retail of merchandise, it provide 9 months lead time for its supplier of leather jackets.

- Inventory Management:

Hard Rock Café considers inventory ordering and holding decisions, supplier capability and production schedules. Inventory management is as critical as any of the ten OM decisions to maintain quality, operate efficiently and constantly deliver customer satisfaction. Right time to order ingredients is critical for Hard Rock Café to make sure that the quality and the taste of the ingredients are maintained and sustained. There is also a standard holding time of cooking and serving of food including the storage of ingredients considering lapse period and expiration period. Anything short of this is not tolerated.

Hard Rock Café maintains a huge inventory of US$40M memorabilia that is vulnerable to obsolescence, misplaced and destruction. It is critical to catalogue, track, and handle with care and strong and reliable storage. Hard Rock Café in its organization has a special division handling and taking care of this. They catalogue each item, including story behind it, and knowing exactly what is what wall in what café. As part of the inventory maintenance, they choose several cafes every 5 to 7 years to refurbish memorabilia and consider replacement if needed.

- Scheduling:

Hard Rock determines and implements intermediate and short term schedules that effectively and efficiently utilize both personnel and facilities while meeting customer demands. Hard Rock Café has efficient scheduling and deployment of its staff. The Café staff is scheduled down to 15- minute intervals to meet seasonal and daily demand changes. They also have various manpower headcount deployment depending on events and seasonality. Hard Rock Café studies historical sales take up and consider this among other things like future events and seasons to forecast sales. This is their basis to plot out manpower requirement, deployment and schedule. Hard Rock Café should consider tools like linear programming to schedule personnel and facilities.

- Maintenance:

Requires decisions that consider facility capacity, production demands and personnel necessary to maintain reliable and stable process.

Café cleanliness is top priority for Hard Rock which includes all equipment and other tools are working at 100% capacity and reliability. There is a constant and continuous and sustaining review and audit of its facilities and equipment. Serving hot food hot and cold food cold is reliant on how maintained and how reliable are the equipment. Hard Rock makes sure that facility capacity, production demands and personnel are maintain to make sure equipment are reliable, memorabilia are updated and looks new and process are stable. As part of Hard Rock’s maintenance, they choose several cafes every 5 to 7 years to refurbish memorabilia and consider replacement if needed. They also consider renovating old café and make sure it is updated on look and performance.

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

The case given information does not much provide adequate data to determine the productivity of the staff using output over input resources or thru a multi factor approach where output over labor, material, and energy, capital and miscellaneous.

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