Operation Management Of KFC Click to Get Sample Solution

Question: Describe about the Operation Management of Kentucky Fried Chicken? Answer: 1.0. Introduction Kentucky Fried Chicken is also known as KFC, is among one of the leading fast food giants in the world. It is based in Louisville. It has been ranked third largest chain with more than 13000 outlets in more than 109 countries and serves approximately 12 million consumers every day. KFC is known for its original recipe for fried chicken, which is prepared using a blend of secret 11 herbs and spices (Buick, 1982). They are operating in an industry which is based on quick service and delivery to its consumers. They have managed to curtail the service time by more than 50% and improved the productivity of its employees. This helped them to outperform others and yield higher profits and sales figures(Fitzsimmons, Fitzsimmons and Bordoloi, 2014). The aims at continuously provide superior service and improve themselves. It is highly crucial for them to improve the efficiently of their entire operation so as to be able to serve costumers as quickly as possible. To achieve this, they have foc used on all aspects, such as facility layout, quality management, total costs and infrastructure to match up with the desires and need of its consumers. Getting Tired of Never-Ending Assignments? Hire an Expert from MyAssignmenthelp and Get the Necessary Assignment Help at a Reasonable Rate. 2.0. Customers KFC serves to a wide range of consumers such as, Families, Teen agers and children. They provide its customers with a wide range of option to choose from. KFC have always been an order winner by trying to strengthen their order qualifying aspects (Gordon, 2013). Order qualifiers means the basic characteristics that the product or service must possess in order to be considered by consumers for purchase. The consumers demand, value for their money, i.e. the price of the product must be reasonable (Heizer and Render, 2014). Then next comes, Quality, they judge the brand as per the quality of product provided by the provider. Speed in another criteria for consumers while judging, they need quick service and delivery of their products. They also look at the dependability in the products in terms of, whether the product matches the specified requirements or not. The last aspect that consumers focus on is flexibility, i.e. whether they are able to bring in new and innovative products or not (Hosseinzadeh, 2014). The above criteria have been mentioned as per Slacks model. These expectations by the consumers have led KFC to form the following operational objectives to be an order winner. Their objectives can be listed as follows: To minimize the cost. For that they need to make their process efficient, which requires huge investments To maintain the quality of the product (Ichiue and Nishiguchi, 2014). For this, they have a very detailed quality management program which ensures that the company meets all the required standard of hygienic food. To ensure that they deliver the products quickly. As mentioned earlier, they have been able to reduce delivery time by 50% by designing an effective assembly line and facility layout and continuously improving. They have always been dependable, as they were able to meet all the specifications specified for the consumers (Kapoor and Tak, 2015). They have always tried to understand the requirement of the consumer. They spend huge amount on training of the staff. They have been flexible in their operations. They produce as per they demand. They need to focus more on their production processes in order to ensure that they can reduce the time taken to produce the products. They can focus on adding new products in the menu. KFC has always been adopting the best operation management practices as they understand that focusing on small decisions will help them to gain competitive advantage over its competitors (KINSEY and COLLINS, 1994). There operations are defined in detail in the next section. 3.0. Operation Management Analysis KFC uses various tools and techniques to determine optimum selection for its location, such as factor rating method, cost-profit-volume analysis, and transportation and simulation models (Matai, Singh and Mittal, 2013). KFC keeps a lot of factors in mind while designing their facility. They are as follows: They ensure their proximity to the consumers, so that they can be easily approached. This is why they have opened so many locations in each city. They understand it is important to remind the consumers about their presence. They always select a favorable location for its outlets, which will lead to increased sales (Ojaghi et al., 2015). They make sure that all the outlets are located on the main road, so that footfall rises. Since they are operating in a saturated and a highly competitive market, they need to keep the prices low (Poto nik et al., 2014). For this, they choose locations that are available at low costs. All these decisions will help them to keep the price of their product low. They locate their outlets where proper infrastructure is available and where there is abundance of skilled labor (Ramachandran and Prasad, 2014). This can reduce labor cost as they are easily available and easy access to stores for consumers is possible. Their most of the stores are franchised, which reduces their maintenance efforts (Wang, 2014). They simply conduct regular quality checks to ensure that all the required standards are met. Their facility layout decisions are influence by the volume of production, fragility of the product, nature of the service to be provided and the costs required to build the operations area (Zhang et al., 2014). Their outlets are brightly lit, with attractive colour schemes and comfortable seating arrangement and a warm and welcoming staff. Their suitable and quick cooking process, superior service makes it desirable among consumers. This effective layout helps them in easy supervision, smooth coordination which leads to high flexibility and efficiency. This also reduces bottlenecks and reduces materials handling costs. 4.0. Conclusion and Recommendations KFC has already invested heavily in maintaining state of art facilities in its operations and assembly line. They are able to continuously serve the customer with best quality fast food at a reasonable price (Zijlstra and Mobach, 2011). Therefore, the only suggestion that be made here is that, they continue to strive for improvement. They use scientific approach for decision making, thus reducing the chances of error. It can be concluded, that they are using best of practices and continue to do work hard to maintain its competitive position in the market. References Buick, J. (1982). Conceptual modelling outline for a new fast-food facility.International Journal of Hospitality Management, 1(3), pp.163-167. Fitzsimmons, J., Fitzsimmons, M. and Bordoloi, S. (2014).Service management. New York: McGraw-Hill. Gordon, R. (2013).The Phillips Curve is alive and well. Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research. Heizer, J. and Render, B. (2014).Principles of operations management. Boston: Prentice Hall. Hosseinzadeh, M. (2014). The role of market orientation on market chaos: A case study fast food industry.10.5267/j.msl, pp.439-442. Ichiue, H. and Nishiguchi, S. (2014). Inflation Expectations And Consumer Spending At The Zero Bound: Micro Evidence.Econ Inq, 53(2), pp.1086-1107. Kapoor, V. and Tak, S. (2015). 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