Question 1

Serving Up Superior Performance

To meet the needs of its fast growing business, food-catering company Neo Group (Catering) has been ramping up its technological capabilities over the past three years.

The group currently delivers more than 1,700 orders a day, catering to more than 45,000 guests. The system helped the company achieve the Singapore record for the most number of buffet caterings held in a single day for the past five years.

The company even developed its own suite of IT systems to help automate its processes to improve productivity in the face of persistent manpower shortages, while still ensuring a consistent quality of food as demand from customers rose.

Neo Group (Catering) operates four brands offering buffet and catering services for consumer, corporate and public sector clients. Straddling to service both consumer and business customers is a challenge since the two segments are quite different in many ways. Even with the B2B segment, there are different customer types each with their unique requirements.

To prepare the company for its next stage of growth, Mr Neo Kah Kiat, Chairman and CEO of Neo Group, decided to embark on the Business Excellence (BE) journey. "We've been in the catering industry for 25 years and are the largest in the industry. The BE framework is a good form of corporate health check for us and going through the assessment process allows us to know where we stand in the industry in terms of protocols and standard operating procedures.

Another area of improvement was to keep a proper log of compliments and complaints. It has since started recording all customer feedback and holds regular meetings to understand and address any customer-related issues. "Our sharing sessions enable us to gather insights and help us review specific problem areas, be it dcor or food quality, so that we can work on it and enhance the customer experience of each segment that we service, varied as it may seem".

(Adapted for academic purposes, Serving Up Superior Performance through Automation, Spring News, December, 2017)

(a) Describe B2B goods and services classifications and illustrate each classification withone (1)example within the context of the catering industry. (10 marks)

(b) Examine the types of business customers/buying organisations of the Neo Group(Catering) in Singapore. (8 marks)

(c) Neo Group (Catering) has both B2C and B2B customers. Briefly name and discussfour(4)differences in marketing to B2C and B2B customers in the context of Neo Group (Catering)'s operations in Singapore. (12 marks)