CASE STUDY An In-N-Out Pay Strategy: Costa Vida’s Decision to Boost Pay 2 For many businesses in today’s belt-tightening economy, decisions on pay need to be strategic to ensure that employees are treated fairly and to ensure that businesses can remain viable. This requires knowing what your competitors pay their employees and knowing your own salary budget. But knowing what your competitors are paying can be both valuable and painful. As a primary stakeholder and former CEO of Costa Vida, a fast-growing chain of fresh Mexican restaurants, Nathan Gardner knew he was competing against some restaurant chains with competitive compensation systems. Costa Vida is a fresh Mexican grill featuring Baja-inspired foods that are made from scratch daily. Following a trip to Cabo San Lucas on the Baja Coast in Mexico, Costa Vida founders JD and Sarah Gardner were inspired with a vision: Bring the freshly made local cuisine with the vibrant lifestyle to the United States. They started their first restaurant in 2001, and after just 13 years, Costa Vida has more than 50 franchises in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico, Missouri, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, and Utah, and as of 2017, 3 locations in . May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. One of the main challenges Costa Vida faces is the fierce competition for customers as well as employees. “You’d be surprised how much of a difference having good employees in all areas of the business makes,” commented Nathan. “For the fast-casual food industry,” remarked Nathan, “you are dependent upon your people. If you don’t treat your people well, they won’t treat your customers well. If your customers aren’t treated well, you have no business.” For months, Nathan agonized over how he could develop a competitive compensation plan that matched the objectives of the organization, but that fell in line with the tight budget of each individually owned franchise unit. He stated, “We, of course, leave the final compensation decision to the franchise owner, but we do all we can to educate and persuade our franchisees to be competitive and fair. In the long run, this is how they can maintain a superior level of customer satisfaction.” Nathan pointed out that a strong benchmark for them has been In-N-Out Burger. In-N-Out started in California and is known for its great compensation package. They start out all their new “associates” (aka employees) at a minimum of $10 an hour. They also offer flexible schedules to accommodate school and other activities, paid vacation, free meals, and a 401k retirement plan. For full-time associates they provide medical, dental, vision, life, and travel insurance coverage. Their reason for paying so high is based on a strategy that lower turnover and more committed workers will lead to better service. “What In-N-Out does for their employees is truly amazing,” commented Nathan. “We often see employees moving from one fast-food chain to another, but we rarely see employees coming from In-N-Out.” Nathan had a tough challenge ahead in trying to convince his franchise owners and managers to think more strategically about their pay systems. He needed to help them realize that paying wages and offering other compensation benefits that were better than their competitors may mean lower profit margins up front, but that the returns would be greater in the long run. He also needed to offer evidence to show that this was not just about being fair, but it was about being strategic. The restaurant business is a fast and fierce industry and companies come and go all the time. What was it going to take for Costa Vida to stay for the long haul?

Question

1. What should Costa Vida’s compensation strategy look like? Hint: What are the company objectives and how can employee pay help to achieve those objectives?

2.    What should the pay structure look like? What pay mix would you recommend?

Please make sure that your response is free of plagiarism. Thanks.

What is the Formal Structure of the Organization and how is the change of environment going to impact how work is organized and coordinated? Describe how this will look as an Organizational Design for the future. Please provide academic references and scholarly insight to support your suggestions.

A craftsman builds two kinds of birdhouses, one for wrens and one for bluebirds. Each wren birdhouse takes 3 hours of labor and 4 units of lumber. Each bluebird house requires 2 hours of labor and 10 units of lumber. The craftsman has available 80 hours of labor and 100 units of lumber, and he wants to build at least 6 wren houses. Wren houses profit $8 each and bluebird houses profit $16 each. How many of each kind of birdhouses should be built in order to maximize total profit?  Formulate this as a linear programming problem (i.e., DO NOT solve it.)

If there are alternatives available, why would firms that compete with Amazon in some businesses use Amazon anyway?

Links to two news items and a short video discusses the Blendtec's success in its content marketing program. The company is now aiming that program at social media influencers.

News Article 1: Making a Splash Felt Around the World

News Article 2: Splash Corp. Accelerates Entry in another Product Categories

Video: Splash Corporation AVP

Critically analyze the information contained in these sources. Then write well-thought out responses to following questions (about 1-3 pages in length, at least 600 words):

1. Describe Splash Corporation’s corporate strategy and business strategy.
2. Summarize Splash Corporation’s strategy by creating the the strategy diamond tool (see Section 10.4 "The Five Elements of Strategy" of the text). Make sure that it includes details of the following components: Arenas, Differentiators, Vehicles, Staging and pacing, and Economic logic (see page 346 of text). [You may draw the strategy diamond tool by hand and take its photo to include in your submission.]
3. News articles 1 and 2 discuss Splash Corporation's foray into other product categories and its overall international expansion approach. Discuss, whether or not Splash Corporation’s international expansion strategy is sound. Justify your rationale in either case.

If you were to create a social media policy including Slack, what types of rules would you include and why? Write three rules and explain the reasoning behind them. Do you think the use of technology can more often than not help or hinder communication among individuals and groups?

Please explain in depth, why you think lawyers have such a bad reputation?

Product A's annual inventory turns is 4 and product B's annual inventory turns is 6. Which product has the higher amount of inventory, measured in dollars?

• A

• B

• Cannot be determined (could be either one)

taking into account the time value of money and assuming that 100 percent of a customer will have experienced attrition once the net present value of annual profits per customer falls below Y100, what is the lifetime value to MBC of the following customers? Assume that a customer's lifetime extends up to and including the year in which the net present value of annual profits falls below Y100.

a. little leaguer

b. summer slugger

c. elite ballplayer (print ad)

d. elite ballplayer (party) i. should MBC throw the gala event?

e. entertainment seeker

This discussion has 3 parts:

1. What effective time management tools should human resources managers use to make effective use of their time when it comes to coping with demands, constraints, and choices confronting them?
2. What experience do you have with team building? What methodologies have your used with your teams as they pertain to organizing, controlling, planning, leading, and staffing? What obstacles did you face working with your teams? How did you work through them?
3. How do human resources managers identify and develop a strategy to deal with employee and organizational development?

IB Business Management HL 2  

You are the COO of our mask company and the CEO has asked you some questions about our processes. Please answer these questions:

• Going forward (after the crisis), should we employ JIT or JIC inventory control? Why?

• Can you draw a stock control chart to show what likely happened from January to April of this year?

• What is our capacity utilization likely at right now? What is the disadvantage of this?

SWOT Analysis for safety in the Delivery of Dialysis Services in Facilities & At Home.

What are the principles of Kaizen?

5.      Explain the 9 general steps in a Kaizen event.

6.      What are techniques to determine the voice of the customer?

7.      What is a SIPOC? Describe each element of a SIPOC

8.      What are the elements of a Swimlane value stream map? What should be added to each task box or note beyond the description of the task? What are the key metrics at the bottom of the Swimlane Value stream Map?

9.      What is Lean? What are the key elements of the lean transformation methodology?

10.    What is the lean concept of waste? What are the 8 forms of waste as defined in lean and be able to give an example of each.

11.    In lean terms – what is ‘lead time’?

12.    Explain Little’s Law. Be able to calculate lead time.

13.    What is WIP or work in process?

14.    Explain what process cycle efficiency means. Be able to calculate a PCE (process cycle efficiency).

15.    What is a pull system? What is the value of a pull system versus the typical way that work is distributed?

16.    What are the keys to creating an effective pull system?

17.    What is Kanban? What are the 3 rules of Kanban?

18.    What is the Lean 20/80 rule?

19.    Explain how both SOAP and REST based web services work and differences between them. Contrast these web services with messaging queuing middleware like IBM MQ or Java Messaging Services

20.    Be able to explain the value of a loosely coupled software architecture

21.    Explain what an architectural quantum is and how it applies to loose and tight coupling architectures

22.    What is an unstructured monolith architecture and why is it difficult to change?

23.    Explain the value of a layered monolith or an unstructured monolith.

24.    Explain how an ESB and services oriented architecture work and what value they bring to the services used in the application

25.    Explain what a microservice architecture is and how it enables loose coupling and the possibility of adding features on a daily basis to a major application.