Managing order fulfillment disruptions: a multiple case study of café operations in Melbourne

Order fulfillment is at the heart of operations management. As a core business process, order fulfillment operations typically involve an extensive array of activities linked to almost every function of an organization as well as its supply chain. Because of the plethora of interdependency relationships that undergird order fulfillment, any slight operational glitches could trigger process disruptions, resulting in service failures and customer dissatisfaction. This thesis examines how cafes managed plausible disruptions to their order fulfillment processes to achieve "perpetual customer readiness". Based on a multiple case study of eight cafes, four franchised and four non-franchised, located in the central business district of Melbourne city, this thesis found that cafes in Melbourne employed a mix of three strategies- disruption prevention, disruption management, and damage control- to deal with order fulfillment disruptions. Appraising the distinctive operational features of the three approaches, this study offers three operations disruption management paradigms: managing uncertainty, managing eventuality, and managing recovery. While managing uncertainty and managing recovery reflect the well-known proactive and reactive risk management principles widely adopted in practice, managing eventuality has not been explicitly recognized as a risk management strategy in the literature and is a major contribution of the study from both a theoretical as well as a practical standpoint. Further, because many product and service attributes in the hospitality industry are not necessarily one-dimensional factors from the perspective of some customers, findings from this study have also shed new insights into the definition of customer loyalty, suggesting that customer loyalty is not necessarily achieved only by increasing customer satisfaction. Maintaining customer loyalty is also about preventing and minimizing customer dissatisfaction.