Introduction
Resource Management of Detox Kitchen will be analysed in this article. Resource management plan refers to the identification of the resources, acquiring the resources, making SMART plan to efficiently manage those resources and finally controlling the resources in order to understand the organizational goals and objectives (Noe et al., 2015). Right identification of the resources is important because a company cannot assure the presence of the resources if they are not identified. In the same way, a company cannot efficiently utilize the resources if proper plan or resources management and controlling principles are not in place (Blackstock et al., 2012). This is where the value of resources management plan merges in which the plan identifies, arranges, manages and control the resources in order to achieve the organizational objectives.
This is a report on resource management plan in which the underlying issues and principles of resources management has been critically analyzed and evaluated. A seasonal SME company based on UK has been selected, name of the company is Detox Kitchen. Detox Kitchen was founded in 2012 from a home kitchen table in London (Detox Kitchen, 2020). The company now has facilities of home delivery, in addition to in-house feeding facility, to deliver millions of food packages to Londoners every year. Detox Kitchen mainly operates seasonal business which is based on the concept it will makes seasonal foods based on different seasons and the food available on that season. This report has critically analyzed the resources that the company requires, it has also outlined how the resources should be collected, managed and properly control to make best utilization of the resources.
Vision, mission and values of Detox Kitchen:
Vision of Detox Kitchen:
Detox Kitchen doesn’t consider as only food, rather they perceive food as something that produces the much needed energy for our health, makes mental sharpness, improve our mood and gifts us with enriched moods and healthy lives (Detox Kitchen, 2020). The company also has visionary objectives of making a healthy nations and increasing the sales quantity to a large extent through further enhancing the nutrition levels in food, enhancing the good quality and brand value.
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Mission of Detox Kitchen:
The vision of Detox Kitchen is all about improving and maintain the food quality and informing people in general to be conscious about the consumption of food in terms of nutrients and values they contain (Detox Kitchen, 2020). As part of the long term vision, it executes a number of works: firstly, it knows the source of food where the ingredients come from to assure that the ingredients are hygiene, healthy and has required nutrients. Secondly, Detox Kitchen knows how to cook food making it testy, nutritive, health and hygiene to enrich people’s health. Thirdly, the company encourages and inform people about the requirement of every person’s nutrition, vitamins and minerals per day so that they lead a healthy lives.
Values of Detox Kitchen:
The company is based on four underlying values: enabling the power of food on human body, making the food tasty, ensuring satisfaction, and easiness of delivery (Detox Kitchen, 2020). The company ensures that the power of food will change the minds of the customers, as a result people will do their best in good moods. It also ensures to make the food tasty while not reducing the value of the food. It ensures that customers are satisfied because it meets their nutritive values and hunger needs. Finally, it ensures that the food is delivered and served to the customers with utmost easiness.
Resource Management of Detox Kitchen: Resource Planning
This resource plan has been divided in four sections: identification of the resources, acquiring the identified resources, managing acquired resources and finally deploying the controlling measures to control the resources. All of these have been done in order to help the company to achieve the vision, mission and values it has set.
Identification of the resources:
Resources can be divided in two types: Human Resources and physical/ intellectual resources. It is of great value to recognize the required human resources and physical/ intellectual resources.
Human resources:
Investigating the staffing requirement: Before taking steps to acquire the employees, the most important task is to investigate the number of staffs required to operate the business (Meyer et al., 2016). As part of the resource plan for Detox Kitchen, this stage should investigate the number of staffs require to operate the innovative and health conscious food operations.
| Resource requirement plan | Number of resources required |
| Chief cookers | 3 persons |
| Cooking helpers | 10 persons |
| Nutrition expert (outsourcing position) | 2 persons |
| Supply chain staffs | 5 persons |
| Packaging & Delivery staffs | 10 persons |
| Sales and Marketing personnel | 3 persons |
| HR personnel | 1 person |
In line with the business objectives of Detox Kitchen, staffing requirement for the company has been illustrated on above table. The company focuses on nutritive values of food, therefore, it badly needs nutrition experts. Here, it has been assumed that position of nutrition experts are outsourcing to have a positive impact on cost structure.
Determining the required skills among staffs: It is of great importance to know the required skills and capabilities that each employees should have because without understanding and determining the skills among employees (Agudelo-Vera et al., 2011). They cannot achieve the objectives set by Detox Kitchen.
| Resource requirement plan | Skill Requirement |
| Chief cookers | Must know how to cook excellently tasted food recipes keeping all the values of the ingredients same. |
| Cooking helpers | Must have basic cooking knowledge and experience and capability to work with experienced cooks. |
| Nutrition expert | Must have knowledge about food values, updated about nutrition, calories, minerals and vitamins requirement by human bodies. |
| Supply chain staffs | Must know the sources of food materials and kitchen accessories; must have excellent negotiation and sourcing capabilities. |
| Packaging & Delivery staffs | Must know how to best package the food, how to preserve and manage food stock in high times. Must also know how to deliver the packages in convenient manners. |
| Sales and Marketing personnel | Must have experience of food marketing, must know marketing persuasion, social and digital marketing. |
| HR personnel | Should have past experiencing of leading HR team and managing a service oriented organization. |
Above table demonstrates the skills requirement for the company. The skills are mainly based on the corporate objectives which the expected team will reach.
Evaluating the sources of staffs for job advertisement: Rouse and Norton (2010) have revealed that a good resource plan should also include the sources of staffing. Without the right source of staffs, finding the capable and qualified employees will be a tough job. Detox Kitchen should also know the possible sources of such employees. Below table shows the potential sources of required employees.
| Resource requirement plan | Potential sources |
| Chief cookers | Chief cookers can be found on job portals, their association, social media and job agents. |
| Cooking helpers | Cooking helpers can be found on social media’s advertisement, employees employed in other competitors and job portals. |
| Nutrition expert | Nutrition expert should be managed from food companies such as Nestle. Social media can also be arranged. |
| Supply chain staffs | Supply chain staffs should be found preferably in other companies employed in same department. |
| Packaging & Delivery staffs | Packaging & Delivery staffs can widely be found in any companies engaged in same department. Job portals, job agents can also be searched. |
| Sales and Marketing personnel | Sales and Marketing personnel should be managed from other companies engaged in same department. Detox Kitchen should also post job advertisement on social media and job portals. |
| HR personnel | Their functions are same across industries. They can be found in any company. Job advertisement on job portal is enough. |
Physical and intellectual resources
Determining the physical and intellectual resources requirement: Resources refer to the physical resources such as infrastructure, materials which are essential to run a business (Potts et al., 2015). Detox Kitchen should be able to identify the right resources so that proper actions can be taken to ensure that the resources are in place when needed.
| Resource Requirement | Required quantity |
| Building and cooking, storing infrastructure | 1 facility |
| Cooking equipment | 3 complete sets |
| Cooking recipes | Minimum 30 recipes |
| Machineries and office equipment | As required |
| Refrigerators and preservers | Minimum 2 sets |
| Delivery and packaging materials | As demand |
| Intellectual property rights | Should be registered |
Above table shows the resource requirement to achieve the mission and vision statement of Detox Kitchen.
Evaluating the required competitive strength in the resources: An organization cannot achieve competitive advantage and sustain the business in the long run unless it has some core and unique value creating resources (Potts et al., 2015). Detox Kitchen should also have uniqueness in the resources that it will acquire. The expected unique value is demonstrated below:
| Resource Requirement | Expected unique value |
| Building and cooking, storing infrastructure | Should be sufficient enough to accommodate the team and meet the cooking and storing requirement. |
| Cooking equipment | Should be efficient, such as the fire pit should be energy efficient; the pots should consume less oil. |
| Cooking recipes | Must be uniquely designed, must ensure that the food is tasty and it contain all the natural food minerals, vitamins and calories to ensure that it meet the underlying post consumption-food-effect on human body and mind: the objective that the food will make mood good, generate energy and makes something good. |
| Machineries and office equipment | Must be energy savers, durable and meet the objectives of Detox Kitchen. |
| Refrigerators and preservers | Must be energy savers, must contain the food fresh for sustainable time. |
| Delivery and packaging materials | Must be attractive and represent the values of Detox Kitchen |
| Intellectual property rights | It must be registered with the proper authority. |
Table 5: Expected unique value in the resources
Investigating the sources of the resources: An excellent resource plan should also outline the possible sources of the required resources because such sourcing plan helps the company to find the resources in efficient manner (Wilhite, 2012). Detox Kitchen should carefully find the sources to in-house them. Among all resources, cooking recipes, can be generic and be copied by other competitors. Only cooking recipes are the resources that will give huge and unbeatable advantage based on which Detox Kitchen can build competitive advantage. Research & Development team of any company can play a significant role to build competitive, unique, valuable, and inimitable capabilities (Smith et al., 2013). Detox Kitchen has objectives of ensuring that the food will be tasty and will preserve all the natural qualities; implementation of such job requires R&D, the company must ensure that R&D is in place. The R&D team should also make sure that new recipes are being introduced to bring variations in the food menus.
Resource Management of Detox Kitchen: Acquiring the resources
Acquiring Human resources:
Effectively announcing the job advertisement: The key to attracting and recruiting a large pool of talent employees is to post the advertisement at the right location (Mountjoy et al., 2013). The underlying principle is that Detox will not be able to recruit the right and qualified staffs if they cannot attract the right pool of candidates. Detox Kitchen should make the advertisement in which it must include the responsibilities, required skills and experience of possible candidates, and most importantly should place the ads at right location. Detox Kitchen should announce the career expanding scope and opportunities of working in the company. For all the required posts as mentioned on above section, social media should play the most important role, job portals should play the second most critical roles.
Deploying effective recruitment and selection process: Rodriguez, Armenteras and Retana (2015) have revealed that recruitment and selection implies to place the right strategies to filter the right candidates and giving them appointments. The authors have also found that the efficiency of recruitment and selection strategies gives a company competitive strength in terms of HR strength. Detox Kitchen should critically evaluate the skills and abilities of the candidates though interviews, written interviews and observations.
| Techniques | What to do in the assessment |
| Background Checking | Detox Kitchen should assess the background such as education, job experience in the past companies. |
| Taking interviews | Detox Kitchen should conduct multiple stages interview (if needed) to filter the right candidates. |
| Personality checking | Detox Kitchen should check the personality of the candidate to check if they do not oppose with the personality of the company. |
| Cognitive assessment | Detox Kitchen should investigate the work knowledge in the required areas. |
Determining the training, induction needs of employees: After recruitment, the most important task is to introduce the newly recruited employees with the company. Induction programs, training and development of the employees play significant role in any company to make the company comfortable with the values, culture, manners, and most importantly to make them understand the company’s expectations form its employees (Lam, Varbanov and Klemes, 2011).
| Training needs | What to do in training |
| Technical skills development training | Detox Kitchen should arrange technical aspects such as food recipes, inventing new recipes for the key and helping cookers. |
| Self-skill development training | Detox Kitchen should arrange training of soft-skills such as communication skills, presentation skills, leadership skills, time management skills, teamwork, ethics etc. |
| Product and service training | This is a much needed training in which employees should know how to package the foods and how to cook carefully. |
| Online promotion and sales training | This is for the marketing and sales people of Detox. They should know the marketing tactics. |
| Managerial training | Managers should be trained on how to lead the team and achieve the broader objectives of the company. |
| Customer management | Employees should be trained with how to receive online orders, how to deal with employees and make them more engaged and satisfied. |
Acquiring physical and intellectual resources:
Negotiation with right sources to purchase resources: Finding the right materials require a company to check the materials and goods at the right source, otherwise correct materials will not be in-housed (Pilbeam and Corbridge, 2010). Detox Kitchen should find the best sources of the identified resources and negotiate to find the best deal. This will also give the company price advantage. The products should meet the requirement as mentioned in the requirement list and their quality specifications. This will help Detox Kitchen to meet the vision and mission.
Ensuring that material resources have assumed qualities: Physical and human resources both play their expected role in order to achieve the business objectives (Antoniu, 2010). Therefore, the material resources at Detox Kitchen should also have assumed qualities. These will help the company to achieve the objectives. On the other hand, failure to reach the assumed quality parameters will pose the objectives in danger. For example, Detox aims to ensure richness of natural nutrition on food. If the refrigerator fails to preserve the food for certain time, Detox will fail to meet the values and mission.
Establishing and equipping the R&D section to ensure intellectual properties are in place: The competitive advantage of a company is embedded on the competitive and unique capabilities of the company (Scarlett and Boyd, 2015). Without such advantage Detox Kitchen cannot offer the best deal to the customers in a sustainable manner. Therefore, the company must establish the R&D section which should invest new recipes. The company should also make sure that the property rights are properly protected and not copied by someone else.
Resource Management of Detox Kitchen: Management and control of the resources
Continuous Training and development of employees: A company should deploy training and development initiatives in right place to ensure that employees are continuously learning and making positive impact on the organization (Furst et al., 2013). This is where Detox should put emphasize on. The list of training requirement has been illustrated on above section, the company should ensure that it arranges the training programs in regular intervals.
Motivation and employee engagement: Bockstael et al., (2016) have revealed that motivated and engaged employees make the difference with their positive inspiration and dedications. Therefore, Detox Kitchen should take all necessary initiatives to make the workforce motivated, engaged and satisfied since this is the service oriented organization in which the employees play at the front-line with customers. If they are kept motivated, engaged and happy, they are much likely to achieve the organizational mission and values.
Ensuring that tools and equipment are in best use: Tools and equipment should be in the best use, failure to do so will result in wastage of property and energy (Morton, Gunton and Day, 2012). Detox Kitchen should ensure that the equipment, machinery are in best use and no wastage is there. It will help the company to save money through lengthening the lifetime of the property and through reducing the wastages.
Making sure that new recipes are in place and intellectual property rights are protected: Detox is based on the values that it will introduce unparalleled recipes in terms of food qualities and tastes. Based on the values, this report has recommended to introduce R&D where the employees will do research in order to introduce sustainable strategies. Now it is time to keep the proper controlling mechanism and tactics in place to assure that the R&D is properly offers new approaches, recipes in light with the organizational mission and values.
Conclusion
Resources are scares and expensive to acquire, therefore, it is always important to make the right plan to acquire the right resources and make best use of them. A resource plan is a set of activities that includes resource identification, resource acquiring, resource utilization and resource management to achieve the organizational objectives. Detox Kitchen is a seasonal food business which has aims to offer the best tasty food at convenient while the natural ingredients and nutrition are preserved in the cooked food. This resource plan will be of great value for the company to achieve the mission and values through rightly identification, acquiring and management of the materials, resources.