Assessment Submission Details

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BSBMGT515A Manage operational plan

This unit describes the performance outcomes, skills and knowledge required to manage the performance of staff who report to them directly. Development of key result areas and key performance indicators and standards, coupled with regular and timely coaching and feedback, provide the basis for performance management.

To achieve competency in this unit students must demonstrate their ability to:

• Develop Operational Plan
• Plan and Manage resource Acquisition
• Monitor and Review Operational Performance

TASK 1:  DEVELOP OPERATIONAL PLAN AND PLAN AND MANAGE RESOURCE ACQUISITION

Read the following newspaper article on a start up food cart business in Sydney.  Your task will be to develop the Operations plan for a 2^nd food cart site.

Please can I have some more?

Sydney Morning Herald:           Date: September 29, 2014

Fancy a dish of piping hot oats and home-made stewed fruit while you head to the office?  Roll up, says Irish farm lass and digital strategist Niamh Fitzpatrick, 41, who’s been sharing her passion for porridge with Sydney ferry commuters since July.  Stationed at Manly Wharf from 6.45am to 9am, her Artisan Oats food cart dishes out 12 ounce helpings of organic, steel-cut oats porridge topped with a dollop of rhubarb, poached pears or apple and cinnamon compote.

Steel-cut oats hit the headlines earlier this year courtesy of the former foreign minister and one-time NSW premier Bob Carr who declared them an essential part of the perfect breakfast in his biography Diary of a Foreign Minister.  Advertisement Consisting of husked oats chopped into small pieces, steel-cut oats take longer to cook and digest than regular rolled oats and are lower on the glycaemic index.  Some organic brands sell in health food stores and online for more than $10 a kilogram.

It’s a labour intensive, up-with-the-sparrows gig for Fitzpatrick, a Manly local, who soaks her oats overnight and cooks them with salt and milk in the kitchen of the nearby Manly Wharf Hotel.  Rush hour comes between 7.40am and 8.20am, when the queue at the cart can stretch to eight and she and her part-time helper have the business of processing a customer down to a speedy 10 seconds.  Saturday mornings are spent at the Sydney fruit markets and Fitzpatrick dedicates a day each week to turning the purchased produce into about 60 litres of compote in her home kitchen.

“It’s hard work but at this early stage I need to be involved with all aspects of the business to ensure it evolves as I envision,” Fitzpatrick says.  “I will take on someone to help with cooking the compotes very shortly as the volume continues to grow and I need to focus on growing the business and new products.”  These include a Bircher muesli mix for the summer months, expected to retail for a dollar or two more than the $4.50 charged for a porridge pot.

Despite spending the bulk of her career as an IT consultant to banks, insurance companies and the media industry, Fitzpatrick says working with food has long been a passion.  She launched a catering company in Ireland eight years ago, prior to emigrating to Australia where she resumed her high-tech work, and those few months on the pots and pans “kind of sparked something”.  “Over the past couple of years, I realised I was moving further away from that passion into a world that was less tangible every day,” she says.  “I had a real desire to get back to basics, reconnecting with people and offering something wholesome and nourishing and real that could brighten their day.”

But lessons learnt at the big end of town – product development, finance, business development and people management – have helped Fitzpatrick get operations off the ground and map her expansion plan.  She has invested in professional branding for her cart and product packaging and has plans to duplicate the Manly set-up locally and further afield.  “I’m looking at other cart locations at the moment and hope to have another two carts up and running before summer,” she says, “Having a cart specialising in freshly prepared and lovingly crafted foods in a convenient location makes complete sense. There is a lot of opportunity in this area.”

Part A DEVELOP OPERATIONAL PLAN

Following the success of Artisan Oats first food cart business in Manly, the owner, Niamh, has decided to open another other location in Sydney within the next four months.  You have been tasked with running this project and your first task is to develop the operational plan for this business extension.

The owner has already done some preliminary research on two possible locations and will be part of the project team assisting you in achieving the goal of a new food cart up and running in 4 months.  It is your primary role however to write the Operational Plan incorporating securing a new suitable location for the new cart, partnering with a local venue to use their kitchen facilities to prepare the food, and recruiting and training staff to run the new food cart and a process to monitor progress.  The owner will be responsible for promotion and marketing of the new site and for providing the food cart and equipment, as well as organising the supply of food ingredients and packaging form her existing suppliers.  You will however, need to plan for monitoring of the performance of the business.  To assist you with this, the owner has provided you with a daily budget analysis that she developed following the launch of the initial business – see Appendix A

Your business plan should contain the following elements

1. Establishing key objectives and Key Performance indicators for the new business
2. Preparing a SWOT analysis to enable you to develop a contingency plan
3. Identifying required budget and resources, both physical and personnel,
4. Planning recruitment and training needs
5. Setting up progress monitoring and review processes.

Task 1: Prepare an overview of the plan and a list of KRA’s (Objectives) and KPI’s (How to measure performance) ensuring that they follow the requirements for SMART goals.

Task 2: Prepare contingency plans by undertaking a SWOT analysis of the issues around location selection, kitchen acquisition, and staff management

Task 3: Identify the resources, financial, physical and human, that will be required to implement the plan

Task 4: Establish a recruitment and training process for kitchen and service staff to ensure that customer service standards are met from Day 1 of operations of the new site.

Task 5: Set up an Operations Plan monitoring and review process to ensure that the project timeline is achieved and to monitor food cart sales performance.

Appendix A

Task 2:

For this assignment, you need to complete Questions 1-4 from the Case Study below.