Q1. Update your findings of research about the managed services of food services operations for the followings:
The unique features of services
Difficulties to please guest and client
Many organizations do not own a food production service and need to buy service from the food services operation providers. The main challenge for these services provider is that they find hard to please both clients and guests at the same time. Taking serving a primary school as an example, the food service provider has to balance the needs and wants of both school, the client, and the students, the guests, at the same time. The food should have high nutrition value while it is tasty to the young students.
Guests are captive clientele
Captive clientele means that the guests have no other choice and are kept in one place. Examples are the students in school and patients in hospitals. They do not have any other alternatives but choices offered on the spot.
Food service is not the primary business
Schools, hospitals and hotels provide their major services as education service, medical service and accommodation service. Food services are usually their subordinate services. Therefore, they commonly ask other service providers to operate the food services. This saves them lots of work and they can focus more on their major business.
Produce food in large quantity
The food served by the managed food service providers is usually in large quantity and is delivered on a fixed schedule. For instance, the lunch breaks of hospitals almost happen at the same period of time. The managed services providers have to serve over hundreds of patients with food.
Volume of business is consistent
The managed food service providers do not have to worry about the volume of customer every day as that is consistent throughout the service period. All food is pre-ordered, usually a month before and therefore, the number of meals and portion size are almost the same each time. For the food providers, it is easy to plan, organize and serve meals.
The challenges and recent trends on the following service sectors:
Airlines & airport //Schools //Health care
Challenges:
People nowadays are more concern about living a better life, so the nutritious value and the taste of the food valued to them equally. The company which provides managed services in food catering will meet it difficulties on it. There's always a trade -off between healthy and delicious, and that's the challenging part which the company has to face. They have to take balance in these items and try their best to attract more customer while maintaining the nutritious value.
The second challenge is that the logistic problem. As the food produce in a certain point and transfers to different places respectively, some are close, some are far away. They have to make sure the food won't turn musty and got infected. The logistic tools are very important and also for the container of the meal, in order to keep the meal warm.
For some of the occasion for providing managed food service, the type and style of the meal will be restricted. For example, no airline will provide food with soup on the flight, because it probably cause inconvenience to the passengers as well as the cabin crews. For school meal, the company probably should not provide delicious junk food like fries etc, as the parents will prefer their children to intake something which is healthier than that. The company have to adjust their plan when they provide service to different occasion.
Trends:
The trend for the managed food service is that I think more and more company or firm will try to use this service, as it's very convenient to those company which need food for a large amount. So the managed food services providing company need to work more on providing food with more options, also think of a way to promote their food to stand out from their competitors. Also the outlook for the food is also very important, as people usually judge base on first impression. Better outlook can defiantly attract more customers to consume.
Reflection:
This
week’s coverage on the casino and gambling industry was very intriguing. For
starters I learned a lot of new vocabulary that is specifically related to
casinos. The casino business has always intrigued me for instance, ‘beating the
house’ where customers win more than lose from a casino. This along with the concept of card counting
was what caught my attention. Card counting is simply a strategy used mostly in
the blackjack family of casino games to determine whether the next hand would
be more advantageous to the player or the dealer. The most interesting thing is
however, while card counting will allow the player to decide between staying in
the game or walking out, and could be detrimental to the profit of the casinos,
it is not illegal. However, there is a loophole. Casinos reserve the right to
kick anyone out and deny service to anyone, and would not knowingly entertain a
player who continues to have an advantage versus the house through calculated
means.
The
concept of ‘whales’ and ‘high rollers’ also intrigued me. These are apparently
the customers that account for most of casino wins. Generating about 84% of the
revenue. If we were to put that into perspective, according to a statistic done
in 2015, Las Vegas Sands based in the US made an annual revenue of 14.8 billion
dollars in 2014, and if the statistic that 84% of the revenue is generated by
the whales and high rollers is true, that’s about 12.4 billion. Hence, these
whales and high rollers play a massive role in the operation of casinos.
Therefore, through this week’s lecture topic and some related internet surfing
I learnt about some concepts applied to the blackjack group of games that could
affect the outcome for the player and the dealer, as well as where most of
casinos’ revenue comes from.
No comments:
Post a Comment