Reference no: EM132605736

"Challenges in Managing Laparia"

Sabrina works in an established casual restaurant in Kuala Lumpur city centre named 'Laparia', which operates from 9.00am - 11.00pm, as an Outlet Manager. The restaurant is famous for its delicious fusion Italian-Malay-Chinese-Indian cuisine offered at an affordable price. Laparia receives a lot of recognition through social media from friends, relatives and media. Due to that, she has to get part-time workers to handle the large number of customers. Most of the parttimers are students who cannot come to work in the daytime, but can only work during the evening shift. Sometimes, the students cannot come to work for personal reasons, causing Sabrina to be short of staff. After some time, Sabrina started to receive complaints about mistakes in orders, long waiting time and angry customers. To fix these problems, she hires permanent foreign workers to meet the demands of the customers. Due to the busy operations, she only managed to train the staff on the basic daily routine and the menu. She did not have time to train the employees on hazards, cleanliness, safety and proper communication. The new foreign staff have challenges to communicate in English too. Some of the new foreign staff have problems pronouncing the names of Italian items in the menu, which the customers found unprofessional. As a result, the situation has turned from declining performance to worse. Due to her busy schedule, she also did not have time to catch up with the customers. At the same time, the owner of the restaurant is considering opening more branches, as the queue is always getting longer and some of the customers do not want to wait for vacant tables, and there are other restaurants nearby too. Sabrina is now tied up with the situation and realizes that she needs to take quick action to control and recover from the disaster.

Source: Fundamentals of Food and Beverage Operations, Oxford Fajar

1. Based on the case study above:

a) Describe Sabrina's challenges in managing Laparia.

b) Highlight Sabrina's mistakes in handling the new foreign staff.

c) Discuss the potential risks in not training the new foreign staff on the procedures stated in the above case study. Relate your answers to the customers' perspective.

d) Suggest a way for Sabrina to manage her loyal customers.