Gourmet

The immediate problem at hand which stirred a fire was that Mr.Rohail Chaudhry had resigned as general manager of the production plant for mithai and bakery items. This was troubling for the CEO Mr. Chathha as the turnover was already high at the production plant. Looking at the profile of Mr.Chattha, he used to work for Shezan Bakery,but after some time he thought that the bakery business held immense potential so he established Gourmet Bakers and Sweets in 1987.

What we see is that he used his strong contacts with Shezan employees to bring them into Gourmet Bakers. The business proved to be a success in the retail of the basic food items, bakery items and sweets. The case states that the business had expanded and there was an increase in the growth rate from 25% to 65% since the company’s inception. Moreover, there is evidence to support the fact that Mr. Chathha had handled the “rat invasion” incident at Karim Block outlet in Lahore remarkably well. The case suggests that he is a strong man who does not rely on anyone and independently makes decisions. So this presents a problem for the organization because Mr.Chathha does not delegate responsibility to his subordinates since he thinks they lack his experience. We find Mr. Chathha to be ambitious as he wanted to provide customers with something new, not just bakery items which resulted in the introduction of the mineral water business and the Gourmet Cola.

However, we see that Mr. Chathha had a planning team missing as he wanted to save on marketing research costs. Another problem was that often the aspect of quality was overlooked in an attempt to keep costs low.

Coming to the HR department, Mr.Chathha felt the need for a formal HR department to supervise all operations including employee issues considering the high turnover rates among the lower level staff in production plants. The problems inherent in the recruitment and selection process are firstly that the supervisors performed the functions of an HR...