Question

SAMOUEL’S GREEK CUISINE

A business consultant with experience in the restaurant industry was hired to assist Phil

and his brother. After an initial consultation, the business consultant recommended a

comprehensive assessment of the restaurant. The assessment would focus on three

areas. The first area was the actual operations of the restaurant, and the proposed variables

to be investigated in this first project included:

• prices

• menu items

• interior decorations and atmosphere

• customer counts at lunch and dinner

• average amount spent per customer

The second area of study involved better understanding Phil’s employees. To do

so, the consultant recommended a research project to obtain information regarding

the work environment at the restaurant and how employees felt about working there.

Variables to be examined on the employee project included:

• relationship with supervisor

• relationship with coworkers

• compensation

• training

job satisfaction

• classification characteristics for employees

The third area focused on learning more about Samouel’s and Gino’s customers.

Variables to be examined on the customer project included:

• food quality

• customer contact employees

• pricing

• atmosphere

• dining out habits

• customer characteristics

Results from examining these three areas are to be used to prepare a business plan

to compete with Gino’s Italian Ristorante.

1. Do the three research projects proposed by the consultant include all the areas

that need to be researched? If not, which others need to be studied?

2. Is there other information that needs to be collected in the project on restaurant

operations?

3. Should other variables be examined in the employee and customer projects? If

yes, what specifically are these variables?

4. What kind of research design would be most appropriate for the three projects,

exploratory, descriptive, causal, or more than one type of research design? Justify

your choice.

Answer 1

1. No, these three projects don't cover all the research areas, besides these three areas business consultant should conduct research on the following:

• Location of Restaurant
• Competition in the Location where the Restaurant is situated
• Financials: Profitability and ROI

2. Yes, there is additional information required to be collected in the project on restaurants operations such as:

• inventory of raw material required,
• key suppliers,
• most consumed items and their replenishing time,
• top ten dishes ordered and time taken by the cook for cooking most ordered dish
• Average time from taking an order to delivering it on customers table.

3. Other variables to be examined in the employee area are:

• Tenure of the employees working in the restaurant
• Years of experience employee had prior to joining restaurant in a similar industry
• Employee capability to understand the customer especially for waiter/waitress
• Ability to handle a difficult situation or demanding customers
• Most important Employee's attitude

Other variables to be examined in the customer study are:

• Frequency of customer visit

4. Type of research design appropriate for three projects are:

• Operations: Descriptive
• Employees: Casual & Expolartory; Casual because it is the best way to determine staff required or increase in staff required, exploratory to figure out whether something new can be implemented in the service
• Customer: Exploratory and Descriptive, with help of exploratory will be able to figure customer satisfaction, new products possible and other characteristic, and with help descriptive can conduct survey and find the correlation between customer characteristics and items orders or time of visit etc.