ASSESSING THE STRATEGIES OF PRODUCTION AND INVENTORY CONTROL IN HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY OF NIGERIA (A CASE STUDY OF ROSEMORE HOTELS, UYO)

ASSESSING THE STRATEGIES OF PRODUCTION AND INVENTORY CONTROL IN HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY OF NIGERIA (A CASE STUDY OF ROSEMORE HOTELS, UYO)

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Hospitality industry is one of the leading industries in the world; It contributes to prosperity creation and further economic development of a country; it covers hotel, resorts, and travel as well as restaurant businesses.

These services business are mutually depend increase in tourism will ultimately lead to improvement in resorts, restaurants, hotel including travel industries.
This study basically concerned with assessing the strategies of the production planning and inventory control in hospitality. This will consequently access the extent to which stock can be controlled.

Production planning and inventory control is a management function that involves planning organizing, directing, coordinating, motivating, staffing and controlling of activities in the store and inventory control.

On the other hand it can also be defined as the art and science of achieving objective of the store in an organization.
A fundamental problem currently faced by hospitality according to Karlin and Zipkin (2009) is the seasonal demand for their products. This problem is very common and concerns a wide variety of products such as food stuff, functions and banqueting and many other applications.

The seasonal demand issue is difficult to access for both the theorist and practitioner. The problem requires the optimal combination of inventory and production rates for each product in each time period to be found; principal question is to determine the product quality in each period so as to minimize the discounted costs of production, inventory storage, and cost sales. This type of demand usually creates more complex problem because firms usually have insufficient capacity to meet demand in high demand period.
This ultimately impacts on planning of production process as a whole.

The main thrust of this study is to map out strategies to solve the problems of seasonality of the perishable goods which is very prevalent in the Nigerian hospitality industry.
The central question here is, how can menu planning guests, and what range of perishable food items can be stored and over what period of time?. As opined by Patrick (2009) combinatorial optimization which means combining planning and inventory control to optimize guest satisfaction in the running of hospitality business remains one of the mathematical challenges.
Strategies directed towards confronting these challenges are many and varied, depending on the methods of meal preparation service and the variety of customer’s satisfaction where stocks are produced independent of orders because there is a need to supply customers immediately with good meals from that stock.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Most hospitality industry today faces one or more problems. This problem of seasonal availability of food items is common to all hotels hence difficult to manage efficiently.
In terms of perishable foods especially, it affect production planning in the hotels.
Since local storage facilities are virtually absent, there is acute shortage of certain items at certain tune of the season and this is accompanied by serious price fluctuation. Also the preference of customers affects the planning of the menu to satisfy the guest need.

Therefore, the problems enumerated has necessitated this study of assessing the strategies of production planning and inventory control in hospitality in Kaduna state. This is geared towards enhancing efficiency in the planning of menu meals service to customer preference and price fluctuation. Other wise the meals planning would run into problem that will hinder the attainment of stated goals and objectives of the organization.

ASSESSING THE STRATEGIES OF PRODUCTION AND INVENTORY CONTROL IN HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY OF NIGERIA (A CASE STUDY OF ROSEMORE HOTELS, UYO)