The weekend has arrived. I will be going to my brother’s pastry shop to help him, so let’s talk about my thoughts on how to improve its management.
How to approach making improvements
Sometimes, we want to help others efficiently. Helping others while showing our creativity makes us happy.
However, we sometimes don’t know how to approach making improvements, especially in industries facing a labor shortage. It is busy and chaotic, so it makes us hesitate to enter.
My brother’s pastry shop was in such a situation as well. In the absence of manpower, simply making more cakes would not be a fundamental solution. I needed to discover and solve the root problem.
Identifying its core competence and simplifying operations could help improve such a chaotic situation.
The terrible state of the warehouse
In an overly busy situation, people tend to pursue short-term efficiency at the cost of long-term effectiveness.
In my brother’s case, he put all the tools and materials he no longer used in the season into cardboard boxes and just threw them into the warehouse. He cut corners on washing tools and even discarding ingredients to save time in the short term.
When I opened a cardboard box in the warehouse randomly, I was surprised. The inside was a mess. There were not only dirty and dusty tools but also dried-up nuts full of wormholes from many years ago. He was even neglecting to throw away the raw ingredients whose packages he had opened.
When there was extra space in the warehouse, there would be fewer problems, but it gradually became difficult to store items. Finally, he lost track of seasonal items.
Since he could not discover the necessary items, he started to purchase items again, even though he knew they were stored somewhere in the warehouse. Naturally, the number of items increased even more. The warehouse became full of unmanaged items.
That put him in a difficult situation. He was buried under things he could not manage.
Considering his shop’s core competence
Simplifying things and organizing them would be effective in such a situation.
However, there was one more necessary element: identifying his shop’s core competence.
A core competence is a unique combination of skills and resources that a person or a business possesses. That makes them competent in one area and allows them to contribute to society more than competitors.
Simplification requires a center of gravity. For example, the creative approach for making affordable cakes is different from the one for quick production. The former demands a focus on the material areas first and then selects appropriate equipment and tools. On the other hand, the latter requires improvement for processing flows, and choosing equipment and tools follows.
That realization showed me how to improve while easing my brother’s anxiety. The strength and the role of his store are offering higher-quality fresh pastries conveniently that neither the local grocery stores nor online shops can provide. That criteria showed me the moderate level of simplification that will not reduce his shop’s competency.
Conclusion
Anyway, I am still enjoying considering how to improve the environment.
It is entertaining to progress something.
Thank you for reading this article. I hope to see you in the next one.
