Panera Bread Essay

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Combating VUCA: The Case of Panera Bread Co. The business world today is highly competitive and riddled with extreme volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Just thinking and taking actions would not solve the challenges. Each new and unique challenge requires equally innovative solutions which entail thinking deeply and critically about each and every aspect of the problem at hand and then taking decisions.
The Challenge for Panera Panera Bread Co. faced a huge challenge about 7 years ago when customers were extremely dissatisfied with the service being offered to them. People had to wait for a long time in queues for placing orders and even after the long wait, 10 percent of the time they got the wrong orders (Jargon, 2017). Even though they …show more content…

As Michael Kallet said in his book “Smart Thinking”, it is not about just thinking and implementing a solution but a proper 3 step process that required careful planning and execution (2014). The first thing that was needed was clarity about the various aspects of the problem, possible courses of actions as well as consequences of these actions. The CEO of Panera, Mr. Shaich, formed a Panera prototype in Braintree Mass to test all elements for the revamping of the service model including self-order kiosks, delivery and digital ordering (Jargon, 2017). The aim of the project was to get more clarity and spend more time analysing the issue rather than taking immediate drastic steps. Mr. Shaich along with Mr. Hurst from Papa Jones, spent over 100 hours a week analysing the bottleneck, observing the activities and finding solutions to organizational issues like capability to fulfil online order demand, probability of errors due to customization offered by self-order kiosks, etc. (Jargon, 2017). After spending considerable time in getting greater clarity on the issue faced, the formed solutions and took

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