ANALYSIS AND RECOMMENDATORY ACTIONS

OF Pret A Manger
Raefah Amerol, Nathaniel Dela Cruz, Jonaima Hadji Azis, Nahara Omar, Mohammad Shuraim Mamainte
BS Accountancy
Masters Technological Institute of Mindanao

Pret A Manger, a London-based chain of sandwich shops, was known for its fast, genuine service and pre-packaged sandwich made on site.
Although Pret A Manger is well known for their high ratings of customer satisfaction, still there are still some issues that needs to be resolved.
Because of their high standards to maintain quality products, it entails problems that affect the overall efficiency of their business. In order to
maximize the profit earned, the recommendatory actions that Pret A Manger should do is to create a commissary for some of their kitchen
operations and to give importance in using sales forecasting in order to eliminate wastage on their products.

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 Customer Service at Pret A Manger
1.0 Introduction
The management of products, services, processes and supply chains
is called Operation Management. The main consideration is towards the
acquisition, development and utilization of resources that the firm will be
requiring to satisfy the needs of their customers by delivering the right
and correct goods and services. The services play an important role in the
economy as it helps in financial services like financing and licensing,
personal services and government services. The basic characteristics of
services are intangibility, inseparability, perishability and heterogeneity.
The world offers various kinds of services.
Operation management makes sure that goods and services are
delivered to the customers. Operation management is an integrative body
of knowledge. The consumers who consume the good judge it from the
value of the service they are offered. Pret a Manger, which is French for
‘ready to eat’, is described by Times as having refashioned the concept of
sandwich making and eating. It was founded by Sinclair Beecham and
Julian Metcalfe, two college friends in 1986. They identified an
opportunity in London to introduce a healthy fast-food alternative to the
fried fatty food menus around at the time.
Pret A Manger, a London-based chain of sandwich shops, was
known for its fast, genuine service and pre-packaged sandwiches
prepared on-site daily. Instructed by its board to grow at 15 percent per
year, Pret considered opening "twin" shops in locations too small to
contain kitchens; these shops would receive sandwich deliveries
throughout the day from a nearby "parent" Pret A Manger is a concept
based in the United Kingdom that is technically a sandwich shop but
feels more like a fast-casual concept such as Panera Bread. Pret (for
short) is a restaurant that sells sandwiches, salads, soups, and baked
goods. They pride themselves on building a kitchen in every shop. Fresh
is the word that comes to mind.
Their innovative venture paid off as people welcomed this change
with open arms. Since the first store opened, Pret has been largely
successful, expanding continuously in the UK and more recently abroad.
Their corporate policy is to own and manage all new shops to control and
enhance the brand and to ensure a high standard in all shops consistently.
They are proud of their customer service .‘We’d like to think we
react to ouor customers’ feelings (the good, the bad and absolute
sincerity’ they say. ‘Pret customers have the right to be heard. Do call
or email, Our UK Managing Director is available if you would like to
discuss Pret with him. Alternatively, our CEO hasn’t got much to do;
hassle him’. It is perhaps a wise strategy in order for them to
improved.Their success might be one of the most successful business
industry in UK by having the most approachable, jolly and friendly staffs
that might be a comfort to their customers.
Their shop was opened first in London and now they have over 260
shops in the United Kingdom, New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo. They
also have mentioned that their secret is to focus continually on the quality
of their food and of their service. Below is the Figure 1 that shows how
was the satisfaction level of their customer to their shop.
Figure 1. Evaluation of the satisfaction of customer towards
Pret a Manger
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At some point there is also a mystery shopper that rates the
engagement level of the staff towards the customer; questions include,
‘did servers connect with eye contact, a smile and some poliet remarks?’
Assesors score out of 50. If the store gets 43 points it says that the staffs
receives an extra payment especially if the name of the staff is
mentioned.
Basically, Customer Service at Pret A Manger includes how they
must have an assurance on how their customer might feel about their
food and their service and this is why we need to study if they have
maintain that ‘Satisfaction of their customer to the overall service they
provide’.
2.0 Symptoms of the Problem
Symptom 1. Operating of Individual Kitchens
Pret operates individual kitchens for all their stores. It implies that
they want to ensure the freshness and quality of their products. It can be
assumed that all these kitchens will require the same equipment, supplies
and set of skills of employees. It can create higher cost for the production
since everything will be produced from scratch in all stores. This might
also possess problems for quality and different customer experience for
each store.
Symptom 2. Substantial Wastage on Food
Since the production of the food is not centralized, there might
be a substantial wastage of food since Pret gears toward preservative free
food. Perishable inventories not used during the day must be disposed.
These accumulates to losses since we are geared to quality and
sustainability.
3.0 Problem
Pret a Manger is best known for their fresh foods where the
satisfaction of their customers is always above average but the symptoms
indicated all boils down to higher operating costs. As much as possible,
we want to maintain profitability without comprising our product quality.
Taking into consideration the number of stores that Pret operates, looking
at their operations collectively, we can say that the costs can be reduced
in order to earn more profit.
4.0 Corrective Actions in the Past
To avoid wastage, Pret A Manager should have considered
creating sales forecast to know how much inventories are to be acquired
on a daily thus allowing them to estimate the number of orders to be
made in a day. These would have cut the losses from the wastage of
their unsold products and unused perishables.
5.0 Corrective Actions in the Present
To avoid the same mistake, we have to train our managers of
every store to understand the concept of sales forecasting. Proper
forecasting will result to better performance of the business. We have to
equipment them with the right set skills and knowledge and have them
use it in the day to day operations of the business. To control the
wastage and costs for production, Pret A Manger can also create
commisaries in the area in order to cut cost by bulk production for
instance, the bread used in making sandwiches. This will result into less
cash outflow because we eliminated the wastage and centralizing some
of the kitchen operations.

5.0 Conclusion
In the end, it can be stated that the Pret A Manger is
significantly relying on its operational procedures that ensures that raw
materials are procured at right time, good workers are on the floor, and
less wastage takes place. There are certain improvements that can be
employed at the stores which can help it improve the overall quality and
quantity of the products. Overall, it can be stated that the stores are
doing well in terms of operational procedures and can be expected to be
doing well in the future if it keeps its orientation towards improving the
operational processes and hiring good employees on the floor. 

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happy-factory-pret-manger-faces-its-biggest-crisis-yet

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