Porcini’s Pronto

Porcinis Pronto Great Italian cuisine without the rest Porcini was opened in 1969 as a family-owned restaurant chain and its business was successful with 4% profit margin. Porcinis was renowned with its attention to bore and price premium was relatively small compared to its quality and artful presentation. Porcinis was able to conserve its steep product and helper quality mainly because it was a family-owned restaurant chain which gave considerable amount of run and of its safe approach on company expansion decisions.However, the management was also viewed as go-slow and comparing to its competitors corresponding O stand Garden and other full-service chain restaurants like Dennys, Porcinis brand recognition was much lower. The U. S. restaurants perseverance had three major segments fast food, single location full-service restaurants, and full-service chain restaurants. Porcinis senior management came up with a Pronto conceptionion which could possibly open up a new area which no virtuoso has entered yet.Key features of the Pronto concept included locations at interstate highway exits, Porcinis quality food and service with red-hot turnover of tables, and limited beer and wine selection. Main competitors would be fast food chain which has been operating along the interstate systems for decades and specifically targeting for travelers, and also full-service chain restaurants like Dennys. It will be critical to come up with a clear differentiator to its competitors, on both quality and service, and position itself against them.Chef Molise was taking it genuinely well(p) on developing a special Pronto menu which would be less extensive with close to lower price than Porcinis traditionalistic menu. Also, Halloran, who was Porcinis HR director, put significant amount of swither onto recruiting the right people and mental strain a Pathfinder Team with 3 or 4 bang-up Porcinis employees at each new Prontos location. One full week of cookery and ind octrination in the rapid, quality service strategy and its implementation elements would be given.On the hiring side, it was a serious superstar. Pronto transmission line applicants would nonplus to pass several screens which include interviews with HR, then Pathfinder Team, and the manager. And a personality assessment canvas was given. It would seem logical and make sense to put focus on creating a customized menu, hiring the right people, and take a hop a team with existing outstanding employees to bring current best practices to the new restaurants. However, it might be in the wrong direction or overkill sometimes.For the customized menu for Pronto, it was basically a stripped-down version of traditional Porcinis menu, so what differentiated it from Porcinis? And why customers should come to Pronto which had less menu choices, and not Porcinis? Even though its a faster service didnt mean customers would pick out lower food quality, even just a slight one. And most importan tly, Porcinis didnt rent if it mattered to them. On getting the right people for Pronto restaurants, was it actually a good idea to form a team with existing employees, while the business nature was much different?Porcinis pore heavily on food and service quality, where Pronto focus on quick service pick up without sacrificing much food and service quality. It would be doubtful if employees could switch their practice so easily and quickly. If they could not, regard how it might impact the new hires in the team. In allege to make sure Porcinis Pronto could maintain the same level of quality of food and service, a customer questionnaire system was created to collect information on customer satisfaction.The idea was great and it offered a discount card to customers who took the questionnaire, in order to bring up questionnaire completion rate and encourage repeat visits. However, the entire questionnaire focused only on food and service quality like meal quality, courtesy and eff iciency of server, restaurant cleanliness etc. , with almost no questions or so the time for taking orders, food serving, and pay bills etc. Also, questions like are you traveling or live in the neighborhood? could give a sense of what were the customer segments and did it align with the targeting customers originally.In addition, it should ask the customer to flagrant the importance of the factors, or simply ask the most important thing mattered to them e. g. Food, service, time, place etc. Without customers intercourse the importance of each factor, Porcini would have no clue on what to be focused on. Another come of metrics to be collected would be metrics around internal operations e. g. how long to baby-sit a customer and take her order, to prepare a typical entree, and so forth. This could be done by having secret shoppers for instance, and it would be valuable information.After all, the Pronto concept was to offer Great Italian cuisine without the wait, if Porcini could not guarantee acceptable table turnover time, success could not be claimed. In order to grow the business, there were three options company-owned, franchising, and syndication. First of all, what do we want to focus on? At the very beginning, Pronto should not be expanded too quickly before it could find out and founder the winning strategy. The first few restaurants were crucial and steps should take slow.Also, full control should be obtained otherwise it could easily go out of track. Also, the failure rate of franchising was pretty big. Porcinis could not afford to have restaurants closed down and affected its brand name. Syndication could give Porcinis full control on restaurant operations. It would also be easier to get a good location as prime undeveloped locations were mostly owned by investors. However, upfront costs were high. At this point like a testing phase, it would be better to take a slower and less costly approach before Pronto concept proved itself to be success .Company-owned would be the best option to start with and Porcinis should consider franchising and syndication after beholding profits from the Pronto restaurants and also a reliable standards could be come up which could be apply quick to many restaurants. To conclude, the Pronto concept was aimed at a market space where no one had entered before and Porcinis wanted to claim this space. However, an important question to ask would be why no one entered this space in the first place? Or did anyone entered but failed?It seems that in order to rejoin good quality of food and service while making it a Pronto service is a big challenge itself. Not to mention the target customers are along the interstate highways, are they flavour for good quality of food, fast service, or a nice place to chill? Seems that Pronto concept consists of all these elements, however, none of them is a real differentiator. Porcinis management will definitely need to estimate about positioning and competitiv e advantage which Pronto could bring to the table.