Cadbury World Group Assignment Tourism Essay

The organisation we have chosen to study and write this essay about is Cadburys world and the key performance objectives we agreed together are cost, speed and quality. Cadbury’s world is a leading tourist destination in the U.K and boasts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Due to its high volume Cadbury’s world has to have set implementations to keep customers arriving at their doors each day. For example they have to produce new material to keep customers happy and for them to know that they are trying new things, also they have to regularly update their factory in which they do tours as people will not want to keep on seeing the same things and thus not wanting to return to the venue.

They have to focus on all of their performance objectives to gain maximum sales in tickets and to keep everyone happy whether this is staff or customers. Cost, speed and quality are three of the most important performance objectives, if one or more where not carefully planned or in order then the business will lose out on massive profit margins and could possibly fail as a business.

Quality is probably the most important factor to a tourism destination especially to a company like Cadbury’s world. It is pivotal as if people don’t feel as they have been treated in the way they thought they would be or feel that they did not get value for money then they will not be interested to return to the venue again. Also they will tell others about their bad experience and will try to avoid them to go so that they do not share the bad experience that they did. With quality being at high standards they have to train staff to perform in a certain way to impress the guests, this interlinks with cost as they will have to send staff on courses or hire a trainer in customer service. Both ways will cost more money to the business.

Quality makes customers have high standards, and a quote from Cadbury’s World about high standards says:

‘In a competitive business environment it is the quality of customer service that will enable an organisation to achieve commercial success. Customers expect high standards and it is important that employees are aware of their role in maintaining a high standard of customer care. This therefore supports the image of Cadbury World and enables the business to achieve its’ objectives.’ (Cadbury’s World, 2006 with high standards the business has to perform to its maximum day in day out to reach the level of customer service that they want.

Cost

Cadburys world have to rely on some factors like quality, speed and cost to keep competitive amongst other tourist destinations. Their cost has to be right because if it’s too little people will think it is not going to be much as its cheap where as if its high people will be put off as they might not be able to afford the day out, also the business at the end of the day has to make a profit out of the venue so has to put a price which will cover their costs of such things as employee’s wages, new machinery and updates to the attraction. If they don’t cover their costs of everything then they will have to cut back and the company will not be able to expand in the way it wants to.

Speed

The speed factor is vital as they have to keep up to high standards given by the management team to the company as a whole. If the company does not meet the speed factor set by managers then it will inevitable have a knock on effect to the business as if one objective is not complete then another cannot be started, if this happens it can cost the company a lot of money in the long run. Also speed affects the customers that are in the venue, for example there is not a large amount of room in each part of the factory thus the company needs to keep customers going through at regular intervals to ensure space is filled correctly, this will also ensure customers have a better experience as they will not be overcrowded once in the venue.

In a company like Cadbury’s word they have to set themselves high standards to gain maximum input from employees. A quote from Cadbury world supports this by saying:

Delivering superior business performance. In 2008 and 2009 we are hoping to increase our sales by another 5%’. (Cadbury’s World, 2009). This way people know what they have to do in their job to be successful and have a target that they have to try and reach.

These three topics (quality, speed and cost) all interlink with each other in many different ways and if one is affected then they all will be affected. However it could be argued that the two which interlink the most are cost and quality. This would occur in every business not just in Cadbury’s world. In Cadbury’s World they try to have the highest level of quality and obviously this cost a lot more to achieve this. But I believe it is the best way to be as they need to gain maximum customers to gain money to cover costs of running the factory. Selling their tickets at a reasonable price like they do is also extremely important as customers will feel they have had a really day out at a fantastic price and had great value for money.

There is a basic model that all organisations can use.

http://www.ammanagementassistance.co.uk/coreimages/opman.png

A general model of operations management and operation strategy. Slack, Chambers and Johnston,(2007)

I am now going to discuss the operations strategy part of the model.

Capacity and facilities (size, timing, location)

Cadbury world is in an ideal location; situated in Bournville, Birmingham it has several motorway connections such as the M5 and the M42. Cadbury World is a fifteen minute walk from Bournville train Station and there are several bus stops just outside the main entrance. It’s fully signposted and all you need to do is follow the Cadbury World fingerposts and wall-signs that direct you through the grounds. Because Cadbury world is located just off a canal you can also get to it by barge which you leave just behind the building. The nearest airport is Birmingham international which is about 30 minutes away by taxi. Cadbury aims itself to be an educational attraction so their opening times are vaguely structured around school times. They have different opening and closing times each month. January they are generally closed apart from 4 days at the end of the month. The earliest they open is 9am and the latest they close is 5pm. This could be a problem attracting families in the week as some parents may be at work during the opening times. Cadbury world is home to the biggest Cadbury shop in the world, and a café. There are 11 different exhibitions to visit as well as a play area, a tasting area and a ride that tells you a story as you go around. As it is an indoor attraction there is a limit on how many people they can have in there at any one time. In 2011, a record breaking 590,000 people visited Cadbury world. The cost strategy comes into capacity as if they are running the attraction at full capacity they are going to be making a good profit although quality and speed could suffer as there will be more queues and staff may let quality slip as they will try to reduce queues. On the other hand, if Cadbury world is running at a low capacity they will not be making much profit and will paying staff when maybe they are not needed but speed and quality will be improved as there will be less queues and staff won’t be as busy so can take more time to concentrate to improve quality.

Job design

In any organisation there are several different jobs which all need different designs. At Cadbury world there are a lot of different jobs available some are on the production line which means they actually make the products, café jobs, jobs in the shop, customer service jobs, meters and greeters, managerial jobs etc. To be able to design a job companies need to look at their performance objectives.

As discussed earlier, the basic performance objectives are;

Quality

Speed

Dependability

Flexibility

Cost

Although all of the performance objectives are important in Job design we thought that there were 3 main performance objectives for Cadbury World.

Quality

Speed

Cost

We chose these as the quality of service and product needs to be the best it can all the time, we chose speed because it is an indoor attraction so if speed wasn’t an issue queues would be too big and people would leave and we chose cost as it is very important to an attraction especially if there primary focus is as a product.

As well as looking at the performance objectives they also need to look at health and safety, the quality of working life and job division.

Quality- The ability of staff to produce high-quality products and services can be affected by job design. This includes avoiding errors in the short term, but also includes designing jobs which encourage staff to improve the job itself in such a way as to make errors less likely.

Speed- Sometimes speed is the dominant objective to be achieved in job design. The job needs to be done at a quick speed but not too quick that it jeopardises quality which in turn could affect cost if chocolate is wasted. If too slow customers could leave the queue once again affecting cost as they would lose money.

Cost- All the elements of job design will have an effect on productivity, and therefore the cost, of the job. Productivity in this context means the ratio of output to labour input: for example, the number of customers served per hour. This is when rate of pay will have to be decided depending how business is doing compared to how many staff are employed.

Health and safety- Job design must not endanger the well-being of the employee, other staff of the operation, the customers who are visiting Cadbury world, or customers that have brought any products made by Cadbury.

Quality of working life- The design of any job should also consider job security as people may not want to work there if it only temporary or seasonal, intrinsic interest, variety, opportunities for development for example do they hire internally for manager positions, how stressful the job is or can be and the attitude of the staff.

Motivation is important in organisations, if people are not happy in their job and no longer feel motivated. Quality will suffer having negative effects on cost and speed. Most companies have job enrichment opportunities , promotion opportunities and reward systems.

Hackman and Oldham designed a job design model to make the design process easier. (see appendix 1.)

Process design

Design must reflect the needs of customers, applies to all of Cadburys products, services and processes and starts with a concept and ends with the final design.

Quality – Cadbury world is a high volume-low variety attraction so quality is exclusively concerned with error-free service so they need to make sure all exhibitions are working correctly. Although on a larger scale, Cadbury is primarily product focused so we can assume on the whole it is a low volume-high variety process.

Speed – As Cadbury world is an indoor attraction with limited capacity some wait is expected in some exhibitions, although an instant delivery in some high volume-low variety operations is expected. But when talking about Cadbury as a product speed would mean an individually negotiated delivery time in low volume-high variety operations.

Cost – The unit cost for Cadbury world will once again differ from Cadbury’s products. The cost varies with both the volume of output of the operation and the variety of products or services it produces. High-volume operations like Cadburys world usually offer the same services. Cost per unit of output is therefore usually quite low like Cadburys world. Furthermore, Cost is relatively constant in high volume- low variety organisations. Whereas, Cadburys have a lot of products which means that running the operation will be expensive because of the flexible and high skill levels employed.

References

Cadbury World (2012) Cadbury World [Online] Available from: http://www.cadbury.co.uk/ [Accessed: 19/12/2012]

Mondelez international (2012) Mondelez international [Online] Available from: http://www.mondelezinternational.com/home/index.aspx [Accessed: 19/12/2012]

Slack, N. Chambers, S. And Johnston, R. (2007) Operations management. 5th edition. New York: Pearson publishing.