Hard Rock, a wide network of cafés, hotels, casinos and retail shops, established in 1971, has made a long way from a small pub in London, England, to a powerful international entertainment and leisure company which serves thousands of customers a day. After forty years of success, today it is also a matter of culture, influencing the development of the hard rock music itself. Below is the analysis of application of the ten decision of operations management on the HRC.
1. Design of goods and services. As it was mentioned above, HRC is a worldwide network of cafes and hotels, also having several music venues and retail shops, which cover approximately a half of revenue. A close connection with the music industry enabled the HRC to differ from other restaurant networks, making the brand and the logo highly recognizable. Hard Rock is aimed to satisfy all the customers, serving more than 3500 custom meals for any taste, from traditional American food to delicatessen.
2. Quality. The quality of all the products is evaluated on a scale from 1 to 7, and anything less than 7 is considered a failure. They expand and change their menu according to customers’ feedback, trying to keep the food, music and atmosphere up-to-date.
3. Process and capacity design. HRC has analyzed and worked out whole production process, starting from purchasing the ingredients to preparing the food, serving a large variety of starters, sandwiches, salads, burgers, sides and desserts.
4. Location selection. Hard rock puts a serious effort into its location analysis, and prefers to franchise a café in the city centers, tourist destinations or other highly visited places of the urban area, paying attention to the population areas and nearby transport facilities. Choosing a country and a city, they look at political risks, currency and social norms – how does the brand fit the country.
5. Layout design. HRC has worked out a layout strategy to meet the market demands, which directs the decisions on capacity, human resources requirements, purchasing decisions and inventory needs. Restaurants, retail shops and the website are designed to show memorabilia and expose merchandise to customers.
6. Human resource and job design. HRC provides more than 20,000 of jobs for kitchen and wait staff, hostesses, bartenders or retail shop assistants. All the restaurant workers are expected to be highly qualified, passionate towards music and their work and have excellent communicative skills for perfect service.
7. Supply-chain management. HRC has worked out an effective and smooth-running scheme to turn a raw material into a finished product, and then to deliver it to the customer. The ways of manufacturing and delivery are effective and modern, so the customers get a product of a high quality.
8. Inventory. It’s necessary for Hard Rock to keep the inventory up-to-date and to use modern technologies to go in ahead of all other restaurants of that kind. Each piece of $40 million valued memorabilia is catalogued, and memorabilia of all cafés around the world are renewed each 5-6 years.
9. Scheduling. Hard Rock management team works efficiently to coordinate the franchise plans, staff work, deliveries etc. To forecast sales, the company takes into consideration the season, holidays, meals served and community events in the area.
10. Maintenance. Hard Rock Café considers a quality and control to be a key to success: regular surveys and menu reviews are done, checking the maintenance of kitchen, bar and retail shops layout.
Hard Rock stands over 20,000 staff members with more than 140 locations covering 6 continents. Every job applicant is expected to have a passion for producing top quality work, to be able to work in a team and to provide quality service. The productivity of kitchen staff and wait staff is controlled according to the number of meals and customer for an hour. HRC has proven itself to be a successful network, and it is continuing to develop and expand.
