Final Project

Our final project consists in a restaurant guide of the best places where you can find a good service in Panama City. In order to make this possible, we divided our group into three groups:

• Marketing: In charge ot looking for the market target, looks for the top ten restaurants, verify if they have proper standars
• Public Relations: In charge of contacting the professional people who supports our ideas, to get the chance of be sponsored by them
• Design: In charge of the creativity, the main content of the website, and the innovation  

  Our main strategies were: 

1. Organize comitees
2. Analyse Market
   - Target guide
   - Evaluate restaurants
   - Render & Demo
3. Brand introduction
   - Presentation
   - Blog Operation
   - Feedback
4. Reserach & Development
   - Guide update
   - Improve & Innovate
   - Expand the ranking 

Our Guide has the following information: 

• Servide hours
• Table service category & type
• Menu suggestions
• Target Market
• Environment features
• Complimentary services
• Average Check 
• Location 
• Reservation system 

How did I help with the project? 

Being a member of the Marketing group, I gathered a lot of information about restaurants in Panama. as I like to visit these places to have good meals, I made the Check lists of the following:

• Casa Blanca
• Sanborns
• Thai Garden 2112
• Riesen
• Manolo Caracol
• Rene Cafe
• Villa Palma
• Stizzoli

One of the examples of the Check list would be the following picture:

My personal opinion:  About the places I visited, most of the restaurants are always nice and have good food. The service is not quite standarized in these places and it would be better to change this in order to offer a quality service restaurant. Most of them had a lot of positive feedback but there were always the same mistakes: for example, they usually don't care about taking the order of the females first, or the way they put away the dishes. Sometims it can be uncomfortable for the client and it can affet the experience. It is always important to smile and make everyone see that you're enjoying what you're doing.

HACCP

 

It is a systematic preventive approach to food safety from biological, chemical, and physical hazards in production processes that can cause the finished product to be unsafe, and designs measurements to reduce these risks to a safe level. In this manner, HACCP is referred as the prevention of hazards rather than finished product inspection. The HACCP system can be used at all stages of a food chain, from food production and preparation processes including packaging, distribution, etc. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) say that their mandatory HACCP programs for juice and meat are an effective approach to food safety and protecting public health. Meat HACCP systems are regulated by the USDA, while seafood and juice are regulated by the FDA. The use of HACCP is currently voluntary in other food industries. 

Helpful websites: 

• http://www.foodsafety.gov/
• http://www.fda.gov/

Excercise: 

To choose, from the menu of a restaurant, one meal of each course, and then identify if it could cause an illness or sickness 

The Executive Café Bella Vista, Panama City
Course	Name of the dish	Possible bacteria	Prevention
Appetizer	Bruschetta	Salmonella (Found in cheese)	Separate cooked foods from ready-to-eat foods. Do not use utensils on cooked foods that were previously used on raw foods and do not place cooked foods on plates where raw foods once were unless it has been cleaned thoroughly.
Main course	Fajitas	Clostridium perfringens (Found in poultry)	Thoroughly cook foods, particularly meat, poultry, and gravies, to a safe internal temperature.
Dessert	Fruit cake	Norovirus (Found in fruits that were infected by touching)	Wash hands frequently with soap and running water for at least 20 seconds, particularly after using the bathroom and before preparing food.

Beefeater Simulator

Beefeater Grill

Beefeater is a chain of over 130 pub restaurants in the United Kingdom, owned by Whitbread. The chain's name references both the English figure of the beefeater, as well as its menu's meat (particularly beef) offering. The chain is positioned slightly upmarket of Whitbread's Brewers Fayre chain.

http://www.beefeater.co.uk/

 

Beefeater Simulator 

In this PC simulation, Beefeater confronts teams with the challenges involved in growing a multiple consumer retailing business over as much as 10 years. At first, there is considerable undeveloped opportunity, but as restaurant numbers grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to drive further growth. Teams will gain valuable insight into important issues common to other business situations, such as:

• building and maintaining a strong reputation with customers, based on high quality product and service
• driving growth through expansion in a large but limited market, when profitable growth becomes increasingly hard to find

 

 

The software gives faculty a base on which to develop the use of strategy and its effects on business in a realistic virtual environment whilst providing the students a platform on which to develop their understanding of strategy through practice and the use of varying scenario's.  

The simulation is a very good tool to create awareness and understanding of the different types of causality that occur in systems and give participants some sense of how to effectively influence those. Although it is common sense that there is no such thing as unlimited exponential growth in practice and that decisions have impact on different parts of the system in different periods in time, it is still difficult for most people to assess how they contribute to their own 'disaster'. Starting to notice the patterns, having a vocabulary to describe them and talk about them (feedback loops, delays, leverage) and having the visual aids of the graphs and loops really helps making this systems thinking practical and applicable.

Books

1. Gung-ho!

It is an invaluable management tool that outlines foolproof ways to increase productivity by fostering excellent morale in the workplace. It is a must-read for everyone who wants to stay on top in today's ultra-competitive business world.

1.The Spirit of the Squirrel (Doing Worthwhile Work) Likened to a Squirrel because they work with purpose and therefore dedication

2.The Way of the Beaver (In control of achieving the goal) Likened to a beaver as Beavers do their work their own way. They work freely and get the job done at the same time.

3.The Gift of the Goose (Cheering each other on) Likened to Geese as they cheer on fellow geese during flight. Refer my previous post named Leadership lessons from geese

Quote: 

"One of the fastest and surest ways to feel good about yourself is to understang how your work fits into the big picture" 
 
It speaks about the understanding that what we do makes the world a better place. It’s how the work helps others, not the amount of work done or targets met. The result? Self-Esteem. Self Esteem makes individuals feel good about themselves and the work they do.



 
 2. High Output Management

 

This is a user-friendly guide to the art and science of management from Andrew S. Grove, the president of America's leading manufacturer of computer chips. Groves recommendations are equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers—anyone whose job entails getting a group of people to produce something of value.

Quote: 

“The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.” 

Your team’s performance, not your own output, is what you are judged on. If you are spending significant time doing things outside of those five key areas, it might be worth rethinking your schedule.This is something  that has the power to revolutionize the way we work.

3. The Alchemist

 

Life is a journey. Each one of us should be trying to follow our own personal legend (that is, what you have always wanted to accomplish). The tale of Santiago, a shepherd boy, reveals what happens when we pursue our own legend: “the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

Quote:

"The Soul of the World is nourished by people's happiness. And also by unhappiness, envy, and jealousy. To realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation. All things are one.. And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

This is an example of  leadership lessons that entrepreneurs can learn from, especially ones about fulfilling our own personal destiny.  There is a new community of social entrepreneurs who are breaking down the barrier between business and social good, also face incredible odds of failure. It is important to follow our dreams and keep fighting to get what we want, always with a lot of effort and perseverance.

 

Chef Javier Lamarca

We recieved the visit of the Chef Javier Lamarca, who talked a bit about himself and his experience in this career. He helped us in our final project, about the restaurant guide, giving us some advices.

 

The service is not directly connected to the quality, but both are really important in a restaurant.

 

We have to focus on our main objective, which is to show the best service in restaurants in Panama, we should not take in consideration that there's a lack of good service in our country, because it is in our power to embrace it and make it better through the years. 

Key Performance Indicators

DEFINITION

Is it a tool used to measure your balanced scorecard 

KPI Explanation

OBJECTIVES

• Measuring our goals
• Quantity Productivity  

DIMENSIONS

A.   Family

i.              Process Efficiency

ii.             Growth

iii.            Cost savings

iv.           Profitability

B.    Category

i.              Simple ratio

ii.             Direct numer

iii.            Percentage

iv.           Average