美国Case Study Analysis:Alice’s Restaurant

Case Study Analysis (Case Study 1)
爱丽丝、艾米和比尔是三个朋友，他们都是MBA毕业生。他们住在一个小镇上，多年来一直抱怨比萨饼。爱丽丝比其他人更挑剔。在这个小镇上，有五到六个送货点，包括著名的必胜客和多米诺骨牌店，但它们都是以价格或送货速度或两者兼而有之来竞争的。所有的比萨饼味道都差不多，都是用相似的产品做的。当西雅图的朋友们来参观并想被带到城里最好的比萨店时，爱丽丝、艾米和比尔都很尴尬。城里没有什么好比萨饼。三位毕业生抱怨多年后，决定辞职，开一家名为爱丽丝餐厅的美味比萨餐厅。他们的目标不是提供一美元最多的食物，而是在一个环境中提供各种美味的比萨饼，当朋友或家人拜访你时，这将是一个很有吸引力的地方。

Alice's Restaurant Operation Analysis

 

Abstract

Alice’s Restaurant is the only ‘High Class restaurant that offers most dishes for Middle Class prices ranging from a dollar. To provide our esteemed clients with an authentic and unique dining experience, which is pleasant, enchanting, and epitomizes the best quality gourmet pizzas at reasonable prices without compromising the quality, Alice’s Restaurant offers a vast diversity of gourmet pizzas in an attractive setting that motivates a customer to visit with their families and friends when they pay a visit. This paper analyzes the competitive advantage, identifies the most suitable tools, that is, PEST analysis, SWOT analysis and Five-force Model. The PEST analysis mainly analyzes the macro environment of Alice’s Restaurant and its impact on the corporate strategy of the restaurant. The SWOT analysis analyzes the internal environment of the restaurant and understands its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The five-force model analyzes the five competitive forces faced by the restaurants and provides a basis for developing a competitive strategy. Then, this paper describes how these tools work and their measures. PEST analysis, SWOT analysis and Five forces Model are also identified as the most appropriate tools for measuring how well a company is operating and make description on how the tools work, as well as the elements they measure. Finally, this paper states the value added by a transformational leadership to accompany.

Keywords: restaurant; pizza; PEST analysis, SWOT analysis, Five-force Model

 

 

1. Alice’s Restaurant mission statement

To provide esteemed clients with an authentic and unique dining experience, which is pleasant, enchanting, and epitomizes the best quality gourmet pizzas at reasonable prices without compromising the quality, 1. Alice’s restaurant offers diversity in gourmet pizzas in an attractive setting that is pleasant to customers when their families and friends pay a visit. Alice’s Restaurant is the only ‘High Class restaurant that offers most dishes for Middle Class prices ranging from a dollar.

2. Competitive advantage that Alice’s Restaurant must have

Competitive advantage refers to that one or more attributes or qualities of your restaurant’s food and beverages services or the setting’s ambience that renders the restaurant more preference in the market against potential and existing options (Meihami, B., &Meihami, H., 2014). Alice’ restaurant is therefore not an exemption. Henceforth, there are crucial attributes that the restaurant must put into consideration to gain competitive advantage in the pizza market. 

Essentially, Alice’s Restaurant being a fast food king should be in a position to exploit the economies of scale in order to achieve an advantage in terms of costs. The restaurant therefore establishes low operational costs which reduces the rate of expenditure thus leading to maximized profits. A universal taste of their product further attracts customers from all regions to buy the gourmet pizza. This is because the three co-founders initially felt embarrassed when friends from Seattle visited and demanded to be taken to the best pizza restaurant in the town. Achieving a universal taste would be an added advantage to  

the newly established pizza business (Meihami, B., &Meihami, H., 2014). Alice’s Restaurant also has to be strategically situated within the town to ensure easy accessibility as well as delivery process to the other delivery points

Additionally, an excellent fast food business model will be a key requirement for gaining competitive advantage. Alice’s Restaurant should be able to establish reliable and high speed processes in its customer service without compromising the quality of their products. The MBA graduates presumably have a vast wealth in business management strategies and thus Alice’s Restaurant stands a better chance of edging out competition since the management team possesses well horned skills in the business.

3. a) The most suitable tool for measuring customer satisfaction

PEST analysis, SWOT analysis and Five-force Model

 b) Description in regard to Alice’s Restaurant

PEST analysis 

 

PEST analysis is a basic tool for strategic external environmental analysis. it grasps macro environment from the perspective of politics, economic, society and technology, so as to evaluate the impact of these factors on corporate strategic goals and strategy development (Igliński, B., et al., 2016).

Considering Alice’s Restaurant, the political factors refer to the political forces and related laws, regulations that have actual and potential impact on its organization and operation. Alice’s Restaurant in competition must carefully study government-issued business-related policies and legal provisions, such as the national tax laws, anti-monopoly laws, labor protection and social security laws. These related laws and policies can affect the operation and profit of the restaurant, and the business strategy of the restaurant must be adjusted accordingly.

Economic factors refer to the economic system, the level of economic development, and the future economic trends of a country. Since enterprises and organizations including Alice’s Restaurant are micro-individuals in a macro-environment, the economic macro-environment determines the and influences the development of a company's own strategy, companies including Alice’s Restaurant need to pay attention to searching, monitoring, predicting and evaluating the overall state of the economy in various strategic decision-making processes, so as to make right strategic decisions.

Social factors are factors including the size of the population, values, and customs of members in a society in which an organization is located. Alice’s Restaurant can discover the capacity of a country or a region through the understanding and analysis of the population size. By analyzing the age structure, values and customs of local consumers, a target market can be better determined, and the types of food and promotion methods can also be determined. .#p#分页标题#e#

Technical factors include not only the inventions that lead to revolutionary changes, but also the emergence, development trends and application prospects of new technologies, new processes, new materials related to enterprise production. Alice’s Restaurant can gain greater competitiveness than their competitors through the adoption of new technologies.

SWOT analysis 

SWOT analysis ensures customer satisfaction through Total Quality Management through which the whole business process is managed to ensure complete customer satisfaction at every stage internally and externally (Sallis, E., 2014). Since this tool determines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and the threats facing a business, Alice’s Venture through its strategic position in the town has ensure proximity for its customers. Moreover, its diverse variety of gourmet pizza products has also given their customers the option to choose.

Further, through the use of this tool, Alice’s Venture identifies the weakness of similar test for its pizza products. Using comments from dissatisfied customers, the venture would be able to diversify the taste of products to stand out competition in the market. Being unique in the quality of products offered attracts a good number of customers who feel satisfied with the services. Another weakness identified through SWOT is the long waiting time before service. Improving on the duration which a customer has to keep waiting will increase customer satisfaction (Sallis, E., 2014).

Additionally, SWOT identified such opportunities as a strong management team comprising of MBA graduates. Alice’s restaurant is a venture owned and run by three competent and knowledgeable partners. This provides the best opportunity for the venture to grow in business. Further, the venture should also target customers from Seattle who visit the town more oftenly. By striving to meet the needs and preferences of this niche market will increase customer satisfaction among members of the segment.

The threat identified by SWOT mechanism was the competition from other pizza delivery points. The delivery speed as well as that of service performance is a key factor for customer satisfaction. Since competition is only based on these factors, Alice’s restaurant must ensure a fast and efficient speed concerning its service delivery performance without compromising the quality of products.

Five-force Model

Michael Porter's Five-force Model identifies five forces in an industry that determine the scale and extent of competition, these five forces combine to influence the attractiveness of the industry and the competitive strategic decisions of existing companies (Dessain, S., & Fishman, S. E., 2017). 

As far as Alice's Restaurant is concerned, the bargaining power of suppliers refers to suppliers’ ability to obtain better prices when Alice's Restaurant purchases raw materials from them. Bargaining power of buyers refers to the ability of consumers to profit from the state in which Alice's Restaurant and bidders oppose each other by means of lowering prices, demanding higher product quality or requesting more service items. The rivalry among competing sellers in the industry refers to the competition between Alice's Restaurant and other restaurants in terms of price, advertising, products and services. Potential entrants will bring new production capacity and require a certain market share. Threat of new entrants to the industry depends on the entry barriers of the industry. The food provided by other restaurants or food companies may be a substitute for food provided by Alice's Restaurant, thus creating a competing behavior between them. This competition from alternatives will affect the competitive strategy of Alice's Restaurant in various forms.

4. a) Identify the appropriate tool for measuring how well  Alice’s restaurant is operating

PEST analysis, SWOT analysis and Five-force Model

b) Description on how the tool works and the elements it measures.

PEST analysis

The PEST analysis analyzes the impact of the external environment on the development of Alice’s Restaurant from the political, economic, social and scientific aspects. Politically speaking, the local government has made clear regulations on many aspects, such as the quality of food, hygiene, qualification of employees, as well as catering waste disposal and environmental protection. Alice’s Restaurant needs to strictly abide by these laws and regulations. From an economic point of view, since the global financial crisis in 2008, the global economy has recovered, but the overall economic level and the consumption power of the general public have not yet reached a high level. Therefore, the price of food provided by the restaurant cannot be high.

From the perspective of social factors, modern consumers, especially young consumers, have become more and more fond of eating out, but in addition to being more picky about the taste of food, they have higher requirements for the environment, service and food health of a restaurant. From a technical point of view, with the development of network technology services, Alice’s Restaurant can adopt new technologies in ordering and payment, giving consumers more convenience. 

SWOT analysis

SWOT analyzes the internal environment of any business organization hence providing a comprehensive view of the Alice’s restaurant’s situation. SWOT determines internal strengths and weaknesses as well as the opportunities and threats Alice’s restaurant is exposed to from the external environment. Using this tool, the interested parties are able to conduct and evaluation of the company relating it to the industry rivals (Grant, R. M., 2016). The strengths refer to the competences that the venture possesses such good management team while the weaknesses of a company describe the existing operational gaps that reduce the maximization of available resources such as incompetent management or insufficient cash flow. 

Identifying internal weaknesses and external opportunities lead to the business understanding its current situation and where it deserves to be in order to achieve its strategic goals. Threats facing Alice’s venture involve competition and changing technologies that the business has to adopt in order to remain competitive. SWOT involves the collecting of data concerning sales trend, profit trends, customer and employee satisfaction levels. Analysis of the information enables derivation of strategies to minimize weaknesses while maximizing strengths. The strategy combinations also aim at lowering the threats while aiming at maximum opportunities. After using SWOT for analysis, Alice’s restaurant should focus on the threats and weaknesses where it can achieve the greatest difference (Grant, R. M., 2016). 

Five-force Model

Porter’s Five Forces Model summarizes the five forces that influence the competitiveness of an enterprise in the industry and provides a basis for companies to develop a correct competitive strategy. For Alice's Restaurant, most of the raw materials needed are raw materials such as flour, meat, vegetables, etc. Since there are many objects to be chosen in raw materials markets, the suppliers’ bargaining power is not high. There are many direct competitors for Alice's Restaurant, including various types and sizes of restaurants. Therefore, consumers have many choices, so consumers have higher bargaining power. Judging from the threat of new entrants, due to the low technical content of the catering industry, less high requirements for funds, so the threshold of catering industry is low, and new entrants can bring food of new tastes to attract consumers' attention. Therefore, Alice's Restaurant faces with more threat of new entrants. About the rivalry among competing sellers in the industry, pizza is one of the foods that consumers love. There are many restaurants selling pizza. These companies compete in quality, price, service, marketing, etc., for Alice's Restaurant, the rivalry in the industry is very intense. Considering threat of substitute products, as globalization deepens, food from all over the world can be easily accessed in various markets, so there are many substitutes for pizza, and the competition from alternatives faced by Alice's Restaurant is also very intense.

Through the above analysis, it can be seen that the production technology threshold of the catering industry is low, pizza is often sold at a low price and the consumers are wide. Therefore, it is not suitable for Alice's Restaurant to adopt a differentiated management and centralized strategy. For Alice's Restaurant, a cost-leading strategy is appropriate because the suppliers’ has low bargaining power and Alice's Restaurant can control the costs of the products better. Alice's Restaurant can withstand the threats from the other four forces by controlling costs.

5. Value added by a transformational leadership to accompany

Essentially, organizations suffer great losses as a result of unsatisfied employees. Henceforth, a transformational leadership is critical in reinventing the company’s culture which adds value to its clients’ experiences. Transformational leadership ensures that the older culture which is obsolete is discarded and a new organizational culture which entails much employee and customer engagement to measure their satisfaction levels is put in place.

 This new culture installed by transformational leadership demonstrates the characteristics of an understanding of the company’s mission, the need for change, improved communication, defined purpose and aligned values, a clear vision, the right quality of staff alongside measuring standards for performance. Moreover, a transformational leader ensures an innovative climate for the employees thus enhances self-efficacy. This increases teamwork and motivation among the employees who enjoy job satisfaction thus increasing productivity (Mittal, S., & Dhar, R. L., 2015). This is because this kind of leadership aims at improving the well-being of human resources who are the most crucial asset of any business organization.#p#分页标题#e#

 

References

Dessain, S., & Fishman, S. E. (2017). Chapter 7: Porter’s Five Forces and the market for angel capital. Preserving the Promise, 49-62.

Grant, R. M. (2016). Contemporary strategy analysis: Text and cases edition. John Wiley & Sons.

Igliński, B., et al. (2016). Renewable energy production in the Łódzkie Voivodeship. The PEST analysis of the RES in the voivodeship and in Poland. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 58(5), 737-750.

Meihami, B., &Meihami, H. (2014). Knowledge management a way to gain a competitive advantage in firms (evidence of manufacturing companies). International letters of social and humanistic sciences, 3, 80-91.

Mittal, S., &Dhar, R. L. (2015). Transformational leadership and employee creativity: mediating role of creative self-efficacy and moderating role of knowledge sharing. Management Decision, 53(5), 894-910.

Sallis, E. (2014). Total quality management in education. Routledge.