Task : PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT AND SERVICE DEVELOPMENT. One challenge in the restaurant industry in general, and for Papas Pizza as well, is a high rate of staff turnover. There are many reasons for this, among them low wages, inconvenient working hours, many employees being students or other people using these jobs as temporary options, and poor work environments with little control over the work conditions. As a consequence, many employees feel little engagement and loyalty to their place of work and have few qualms about quitting should something else turn up. Task:One of the health hazards identified in many of the restaurants has been uneven, and thus sometimes too low, pizza oven temperatures in parts of the large ovens. This has been caused by heating elements degrading and not being replaced in time, thus causing pizzas with vulnerable ingredients, especially seafood, to not being sufficiently cooked. If you believe statistical process control, SPC, can be used to alert the staff to degrading heating elements in time to replace them before causing problems, outline how you would design a system to obtain the necessary measurements and control the cooking process (or argue why SPC is unsuitable to alleviate this problem).

PAPA'S PIZZA Papa's Pizza is a nationwide chain of pizza restaurants. It started some 30 years ago as two family-owned restaurants in Trondheim but has gradually expanded to around 100 restaurants. The chain is now set up based on a franchise model where 95% of the restaurants are locally owned and operated by individuals or small companies. While there have been cases of restaurants closing now and then, most of the restaurants have been consistently profitable and the chain owner, the company Papa's Pizza, has seen annual growth and a healthy bottom line since it was founded. Lately, some changes in the industry have brought some darker clouds onto the horizon: One of the main competitors in Norway is rebranding many of its restaurants to Domino's Pizza, an American chain that recently became the world's largest pizza chain in terms of sales. Some of the more popular franchisees of Papa's Pizza are rumored to be considering changing to Domino's when their contracts are coming up for renewal. Besides several pizza chains offering American-style pizzas, there has been a strong growth in independent and chain restaurants focusing instead on Italian-style pizza, often combined with other types of Mediterranean cuisine. Another big national competitor has for a few years sold fresh pizza dough and pizza sauces through grocery stores and has now expanded its retail selection by a number of frozen pizza types, which have become popular. The management of Papa's Pizza has realized that the company needs to reassess its position in the market and which strategy to pursue ahead. As Chief of Operations, you have been chosen as one member of a strategic task force to conduct some important analyses and give advice to the senior management team and the board of directors about the way forward