Case study: Flour Crown Baking Studio by Mrs Aifaa / Wan Khairina Aisyah Mohamad Aizie … [et al.]

Companies are being thrown off balance by the COVID-19 problem because of fundamental shifts in customer behavior, supply networks, and routes to market. The pandemic response has highlighted the necessity for executives to quicken the implementation of agile working practices and value chain transformation to aid manage uncertainty. In order to repurpose and reconfigure supply chains for the future by boosting both resilience and responsibility, businesses must establish a quick response to address present disturbances. For this study, we selected Flour Crown Bakery in Jitra, Kedah, which sells cakes and pastries. The owner of the bakery’s name is Puan Aifaa and she was born in Kedah. During the epidemic, this bakery became quite well-known, particularly among Kedah residents. Due to the mouthwatering taste and reasonable pricing at the time, this bakery has always been the talk of the town. However, there are certain issues with this bakery that have grown and need to be examined. In our observation, we found that the flour crown bakery is facing some problems such as overproduced cakes, pastries and other desserts which had been made each day to be sold to the customers, under skilled employees which lead to unhappy customers and inconsistent taste of products made by the bakery. First of all, at the beginning, Mrs. Aifaa found it difficult to determine the appropriate size to prepare the ingredients for making cakes and pastries, causing the owner to suffer a huge loss. He also found that the loss was recorded in the daily record. In fact, Mrs. Aifaa failed to give instructions about the actual or target number of cakes produced each day. Therefore, this is why more cakes and pastries are produced by bakeries. He cannot estimate the cakes and pastries sold in a day to customers who are not our daily staples. Next, the lack of skills of the workers caused an imbalance in the quality of the products and failed to meet the demands of the customers who ordered the products. This causes as one of the factors the owner's lack of sales every day. However, since the outbreak began two years ago, customers have complained that their products do not taste the same as the old ones. This has reduced their sales since they received feedback from customers which has raised their concerns about their business in the future. In today's increasingly widespread social media era, feedback has spread rapidly on social media as social media is their primary source of positive feedback on the product. Furthermore, mistakes in the preparation of ingredients to make cakes such as excess flour in the cake, lack of quality preparation materials, unattractive cake decorations and so on cause the product to lose its original taste and increase customer dissatisfaction. The solutions had been made based on the issues above that the total amount of cakes and pastries that must be produced in order to be sold on that day must also be determined by Puan Aifaa. Puan Aifaa will be able to prevent this by instructing her employees not to make an excessive number of cakes and pastries in a single day because doing so could result in waste and damage if buyers do not buy them. Next, provide training for the employees in order to create a creative and innovative employee. They also will be more professional to handle their customers from now on. This will give satisfaction to both customers and the business. Lastly, the bakery could divide the menus into groups and rank based on the difficulty to produce. For example, sorting the products based on their rank can help the baker to prioritize in producing the most important products to bake first or to properly bake the most sensitive products that have complicated ingredients later. After sorting and ranking the products then dividing the products into groups that need the similar skills to produce so that it can be assigned to the most suited baker that fulfilled most of the skills. By doing so, Flour Crown can easily divide the task to meet the demands and needs of their customer automatically will improve the customers satisfaction.