Operation Management - Cadburyworld

Cadbury World

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The service concept of Cadbury World is the form, function and overall purpose of the design and the benefits it will provide to meet the needs and expectations of the customers. By means of form, the overall shape of the service concept is the contemporary leisure experience to permanent exhibition devoted entirely to chocolate but also to have educational value and be guided by the spirit of the old tours. By means of function, the service concept operates in a way of servicing social responsibility and the desire to be a good neighbour. By means of purpose, the service concept is intended to satisfy the adults who fondly remember their childhood tours to CadburyЎ¦s factory visit, the requests from educational groups and individuals who are interested in visiting the factory. By means of benefits, the advantages the service concept will bring to customers are to enjoy leisure experiences with educational value at low prices.

The service package of Cadbury World consists of the series of core (the experience), supporting (the shop, restaurant, coffee and ice-cream parlour) and facilitating (parking) processes which all need to be designed. The design of the service package is compromised by:

The service concept

In order to achieve low price objective, Cadbury World keeps the staff costs (hiring limited numbers of unskilled staffs), technology costs (lack of technology to streamline the operation process) and facility costs (old and outdated facilities) at lowest possible. In return, they have to compromise low costs with their other objectives.

The unskilled staffs and outdated facilities are compromised with the quality in the core process. For example, the brief video (facility) in the packaging plant is outdated and requires commentary notes from some guides. However, the unskilled guides are not familiar with the operations so they need to read from hand-written prompt cards, which is not professional to the eyes of the customers. As one of the service concept is to provide educational value, the quality of the front-end staffs are important to satisfy the expectations of the customers.

The insufficient of staffs and technologies (information technologies) are also compromised with the speed objective as they are the main components to get customers through the process. In the core and supporting process ЎV the exhibitionЎ¦s reception area, the entrance, the Marie Cadbury room and the restaurant, the customers have to wait to receive their service. The stagnation increases costs due to longer cycle time and reduces dependability to the operations.

Finally, the service concept is compromised with the flexibility objectives. The concept is to sell the service entirely about chocolate with spirit of old tours so the package is lack of product/service and mix flexibility. The insufficient staffs and technologies are compromised with volume flexibility and hence there are always queues at peak times at each micro-operations.

The limited capital for the project

The design of the service package is compromised with the limited capital for the project. The East Cocoa Block (the old factory) is remained to sell the concept of ЎҐold tourЎ¦, but also due to the limited capital does not allow huge investment to rebuild a new factory (of course with old look) to integrate with the design of the new visitor center. This has compromised with the speed (slow customersЎ¦ flow), dependability (the packaging plant shut down for maintenance for 37 days per year) and flexibility in volume. In addition, the alternative exhibition located 300 metres from the main exhibition is also possibly due to limited capital, which is also compromised with the speed objectives.

Furthermore, the limited capital does not allow installing sufficient technologies to streamline the process of operations. For example, the ticket collector at the entrance can check the flow through information technologies to control the number of visitors entering to increase speed, eventually improve dependability and flexibility. In addition, the self-service display at the shop is compromised with dependability (the pilferage by children directly affect the stock availability) due to a lack of automated security systems.

Other factors

The location of Cadbury World is far away from town. The coaches often arrive late and miss their agreed times because of the difficulty of estimating the duration of road journeys. This has compromised with speed and dependability as the delay adds to the queues of visitors at the exhibition entrance at busy periods

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