Assignment 1: Vice President of Operations, Part 1
Due Week 3 and worth 200 points
Scenario: Imagine that you are the vice president of operations at a production or service organization. You have noticed that your organization’s current operations strategy is not supporting the challenges that the organization is presently facing. In order to maintain a competitive edge, you must address these challenges with your Chief Executive Officer immediately.
Select an existing production organization. Analyze the organization’s current vision, mission, business strategy, operation strategy, supply chain, total quality management, just-in-time philosophy, forecasting method, statistical technique, facility location, work design, project life cycle, and project management. Note: You will need this information in order to complete this and subsequent assignments.
As you collect the information for Assignment 1 and Assignment 2, remember that in Assignment 3 you must prepare a presentation for your Chief Executive Officer.
Write a three to five (3-5) page paper in which you: 1. Evaluate key elements of the selected production or service organization’s operational efficiency with its operational strategy. Determine three (3) tasks that do not align with the operational strategy. Determine the weaknesses that are evident in each task. 2. Formulate a new operations strategy for the selected organization based on the four (4) competitive priorities (i.e., cost, quality, time, and flexibility). 3. Analyze both the structure of the competitive priorities and infrastructure of the production process. Develop three (3) new enablers that are aligned with the long-term plan of the selected organization. Evaluate three (3) pros and three (3) cons of the new enablers. 4. Use at least three (3) quality academic resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and other Websites do not quality as academic resources.

I would like to talk about a company called Darden, which has grown to become the world’s largest full-service restaurant company. Through subsidiaries, they own and operate more than 2,100 restaurants, employ more than 200,000 people and serve more than 425 million meals a year. The Darden restaurants’ family features some of the most recognized and successful brands in full-service dining: Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Long Horn Steakhouse, The Capital Grille, Bahamas Breeze, and Seasons 52. Their brands have been established over decades of learning from their guests. Their culinary inspirations come from the fishing villages of Maine, the family tables of Italy, and the American West icons that reflect the rich diversity of those who visit their restaurants. They are leading the restaurant business during the past decade based on their reliability supply chain and the customer services that they provided based on an outstanding training program to their management team and their crew as well. Nothing is more important to obtain and deliver healthy and high quality, and there are very few industries where supplier performance is linked so closely to the customer. Darden gets its food from five continents and from thousands of suppliers. To meet the needs of Darden about fresh ingredients, the company has developed four different supply chains: one for seafood, another for dairy products, vegetables and refrigerated third for other food products such as baked goods, and fourth for restaurant utensils (everything from plates to oven and uniforms). They spend more than 1,500 million dollars annually in these supply chains. In order to obtain a fair and accurate evaluation, the total quality program for Darden provider includes a program of independent verification; each supplier is evaluated regularly by independent auditors on a risk-based program to determine the effectiveness of the provider. Supplier rating: Long before a provider is qualified to sell to Darden, they receive a total quality team. The team, consisting of staff from the departments of quality assurance, cooking, shopping and distribution, spend some time at the supplier's facility to understand the processes and evaluate their effectiveness in the administration of the safety and quality of their food. The team provides guidance, assistance, support and training to the supplier to ensure the achievement of the overall objectives and results, which from the logistically point of view, represent a way to minimize further inconvenience with the product or service to be negotiated. Just-In-Time delivery and quality service in each of the 1,450 restaurants Darden is the final step of this excellent well thinking supply chain process. The four Darden supply channels have some characteristics in common. All supplier qualification required, have tracking products that are subject to independent audits, and employ JIT delivery. With the best techniques and in-class processes, Darden creates partnerships and alliances for supply chain worldwide, which are fast, transparent, and efficient. Darden achieve a competitive advantage through its superior supply chain. As we could appreciate, the margin of error is very low in this operation, based on great control system and proper training for the team. But, recently a little problem happened, in august 2013, customers of Red Lobster and Olive Garden in the states of Iowa and Nebraska acquired a stomach illness tied to a rare type of parasite, after eating a mixed salad that came from Mexico, said the Food and Drug of United States. The federal agency said its investigators are tracing the outbreak in four "disease groups" in restaurants, which spokeswoman food agency later identified as Red Lobster and Olive Garden. So in this specific stage of the supply chain, something failed, what happened with the quality controls? How about the sanitization process? So even you posses an almost perfect supply chain system, situation like this one, could happen.
Now, recently there are some signs showing some kind of concern to the Chairman and the upper level management, and is based on the company loosing sales during the present year, and one of the reason was that the company was thinking about Obamacare, they started a pilot plan and they started to take hours from their employees and reduced their hours until they became part-time employees (in order to avoid to offer Obamacare to their employees) that situation created a bad impression on their regular clientele and guess, and they stopped having meals with their concept, creating a negative marketing toward their concepts; a few months later, they decided to reverse the original plan, and they gave back hours for their employees, based on the loosing of sales that they got during that business quarter. The company, based in Orlando, Florida, later announced that none of its current full-time employees would have their status changed as a result of the new regulations. The move will come just after the company lowered its profit outlook for the year, failed promotions, and negative publicity from its tests that used more part-time employees. Part of the new strategy that I would try, should be to try to reverse such bad publicity, and I would start a marketing campaign that includes a part of their staff (Servers, Cooks, Busboys, Host, Bartenders) talking positive things about the company and the good things that the company have been doing for them; also recognizing that they made a mistake and they will continue to work in order to fix their mistake, trying to recover part of their credibility and good image that they had before this issue. Another strategy that I would implement, should be, specifically, with two of their core brand, Olive Garden and Red Lobster, I would initiate an study that could showed me what innovation in the menu and service their guest are expecting, bring new menu and less expensive one, which continue offering great quality of products, but with a better price, some times, you have to re-invented the concept, and for me is the best time to do it with this two concepts, and talking about prices, I would invest more money in technology in the supply chain process, like inventory systems that includes due date for the products in order to avoid throw away products because are in bad condition, and will continuing serving great quality of products; those steps, would save you money because they will reduce their spillage product and they should have a better optimize system. Another strategy that I definitely I would try, is the improvement of the quality of service, always, there’s some room to improve, and when you go to one of this concept, like Olive Garden, you notice that there are some areas of opportunities service wide, for example, the time you waited at your table once they seat you, sometimes they greet you after 10 min, and that is not acceptable, beside, you are loosing money, because you are not selling or at least suggesting to upgrade the item of the menu; I would implement a training in which the servers would be working together as a team, and help each other to take the order to the customers to reduce the waiting time, that also translate, in loosing money due to they slowing down the table’s rotation (must of the time there is waiting list).