Essay BSB51918: Diploma of Leadership and Management – Long Mile Coffee Roasters – Management Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

Change and operations: Long Mile Coffee Roasters

Background

You are the manager of Long Mile Coffee Roasters in Melbourne. Long Mile has been in the coffee roasting business for over seven years with a loyal customer base in the inner northern suburbs. 

The flagship cafe is in Brunswick, where Long Mile roast their beans. The company also owns three other cafes in the surrounding suburbs. Several other cafes in the area also purchase wholesale beans from Long Mile for use in their stores. 

Long Mile is co-owned by two friends, Anthony Sellers and Mitch Roberts. Mitch is mainly an investor with an interest in coffee, while Anthony, being a coffee roaster for 15 years, deals with the sourcing and roasting of the beans. You are the manager of operations on a day to day level, and as a result you are often consulted about the strategic plan for the company.

Business has been going very well since the company was founded and there has never been a need to change the business plan. However, Long Mile has recently been under fire regarding the ethical sourcing of their coffee beans. 

The problem

News has surfaced that Melbourne roasters have been underpaying for coffee beans from communities in Central and South America. The ethical sourcing of coffee beans has been a contentious issue in the coffee community for many years, as Western buyers have entered poor communities, exhausting their coffee bean production areas and leaving these communities worse off than before. 

The damaging media campaign that followed resulted in a community and wholesale boycott of Long Mile’s coffee beans. Sales have dropped and employees have left, resulting in the closure of one of Long Mile’s cafes. 

In order to regain the trust and support of their customers, the company will need to focus on innovation and change. The owners of Long Mile have identified three problem areas that they need to address:

• regain the trust and support of customers
• retain staff
• recover sales.

The solutions

In order to achieve some or all of these goals you and the owners have brainstormed a number of possible innovations.

• To regain the trust and support of customers: use smartphone technologies, such as apps, to directly inform customers about the ethical practices of Long Mile (where they source their coffee, and the philanthropy work they already do in these communities)
• To retain staff: change their role in the operation of the business through organisational change (investment opportunities, training opportunities, promotional opportunities)
• To recover sales: sell Long Mile beans direct to the public from their own cafes
• and, given your experience as manager of Long Mile, the managers are also open to your own suggestions as to how the business could innovate

You have been tasked with choosing and implementing the strategy you feel will best respond to the problems faced by Long Mile. You will need to conduct a SWOT analysis based on the information above, develop a change management plan and an operational plan to begin the innovation and change process. You will be required to assign appropriate physical and financial resources to the tasks detailed in your operational plan – a total budget amount has been provided for financial resource allocation.