Global Business Engineering Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Global Business Engineering Case Solution

Introduction

Cut ‘n Go refers to a simple hairdresser located at Univer-city and the location of the shop is prime, as it is situated at the center of the city. Its offer not only simple hair cut, but offers professional hairdressing services to its customers like hair straightening, hair coloring for both male and female as well. As the shop is located across the university, 80% of its customers are students. Along with that, Cut 'n Go sells hair products such as combs, brushes, gel, shampoo, and hair dyes. The area of this barber shop is 70 square meters and currently, five permanent dressers are working in the shop with three additional flex workers, which can be available at peak times with the notice period of two hours. They are paying €2400/square meter per year for the area and €4350 for additional costs, which include purchasing cost, energy cost, and other maintenance costs.

Operational management issues:

Most of its customers are students, so they do not want spend lot of the time in the shop, as they have to attend classes. The company follows the first come and first serve strategy, in which the employees will first provide service to those customers who come first. However on Saturdays, the shop takes appointments; the reason is that on Saturday, most customers are elderly people. According to this strategy, latecomers would be out of luck. On the other hand, the company is effectively providing services to the customers, who do not spend more than 45 minutes average time in the shop. However, if customers in a queue take more time, the customers will switch to other shops for haircuts.

In addition to this, the owner of the shop is also facing the issue of a low workforce, as available hours are less than the required hours in a week and average working hours of existing employees are extremely less compared to the demand. Beside the five permanent workers, three part-time workers are also available but on a prior notice period of two hours. Therefore in that case, chances of losing customers are high due to the low workforce and the availability of fewer hours of workers than the total required hours to deal with the expected demand of customers.

Average Customers per week	375
Average time per customer	45	minutes
total required working minutes	16875

Available time in a weak as per workforce
Week days	5
Total hours in a day	9	9am-18pm
total weak hours	45	hours

total working hours on Saturday	6
total working hours in a weak	51
total working minutes in a week	3060
total working minutes as per staff	15300