Bus & Breakfast App: More Time, For a Better Breakfast

Faced with the growing challenges of global competition, rapid change, and increasing complexity, organizational structures are becoming more flexible and fluid (Mohrman, Galbraith, Lawler, & Asscociates, 1998). Advances in information technology have made virtual organization come true and the key factor in the virtual organization is collaboration. Due to several advantages of collaboration in the virtual organization, our HK style tea restaurants decide to cooperate with KMB.

Introduction of HK style tea restaurants

The new mobile application, Bus&Bre akfast app, reflects a collaboration of Kowloon Motor Bus Co. Ltd and Hong Kong style tea restaurants. In this collaboration process, we represent the HK style tea restaurants. The characteristics of our business are small scale and decentralization. Currently, the situation becomes worse and worse since we are facing drastic competition with big chain fast food restaurants such as Maxim’s and Café De Coral, etc. Despite our long history in Hong Kong and already be regarded as a part of Hong Kong cooking culture, we are still in the risk of closing down. In order to assist us to survival from the fierce competition, we need to cooperate with a strong partner.

Introduction of our business partner -----KMB

 

Kowloon Motor Bus (KMB) Co. (1933) Ltd is a well-known local company. There are two reasons that we choose KMB for collaboration. On one hand, it has a strong competitor as well, which is MTR. KMB’s passenger flow is weaker than MTR. Currently, the situation even becomes worse. More and more people would like to choose MTR rather than KMB. The main reason is that MTR is more punctual than KMB. Besides, people can always find take-away food in MTR station, which makes breakfast easier to get and helps office workers save a lot of time. If the KMB cooperate with us, they also can integrate the transportation service and catering service to form a complete service chain like MTR. One the other hand, the KMB already has the basic software facilities to make our collaboration possible. For instance, it has its own website and mobile application. However, the functions of mobile application only can search the route map. What we need to do is enriching the content of the app, adding some new functions on the website as well. In short, it already has platform. Therefore, we only need to change some details so that we can reach a win-win situation.

Introduction of Bus & Breakfast and virtual collaboration

 

Bus&Breakfast is an app, which provides a virtual platform for bus passengers to order breakfast and review the HK style tea restaurants. In fact, we still use the KMB app platform, but we add new function about selecting and ordering breakfast. During the process of our collaboration, we first select some high quality HK style tea restaurants that near the each bus stop. All of these tea restaurants combine together work as tea restaurant community to bargain with KMB. This measure aims to ensure the equality during the collaboration process since KMB seems stronger than those decentralized tea restaurants. Apart from both sides, passengers also can get many benefits from our collaboration. We help them save a lot of time in waiting breakfast. How can we achieve that? First, the customers need to download our Bus&Breakfast app to their mobile instrument. When they get on the bus every morning, opening the app, they can select tea restaurants and choose what kinds of breakfast they prefer to order. They can even pre-pay through the virtual platform. And then, they can relax on their bus seat and enjoy the morning journey. During this period, tea restaurants will fulfill those orders and pack up each order. Thus, after customers get off the bus, they can go directly to the restaurant and pick up their breakfast without waiting in the queue or waiting for a long time.

The position of Bus&Breakfast

A clear position is significant for a company. Our slogan is “more time for a better breakfast”. The whole marking position contains four parts. Firstly, our product position is that B&B is a habitual app rather than a traffic app only when needed. People who need to take bus in the morning will first come up with our mobile app to help them get ready the breakfast. It will become a useful tool for everyday life. Secondly, our virtual company position is that KMB emphasize point-to-point transportation and leisurely lifestyle compared with MTR. HK style tea restaurants aim to provide a no queuing service for all bus passengers. It helps add values to both KMB and tea restaurants, which allow the synergy works (1+1>2). Besides, the competition position from out restaurants’ perspective is that building the community to compete with big fast food chain restaurants. After all, we have our own advantages compared with fast food chain restaurants. For instance, a vast of citizens prefers traditional HK flavor and traditional HK food instead of modern fast food. Last but not least, targeting a clear group of customer is quite important since we can focus different group to promote our products. Our B&B mainly targets the fast-moving working class who need to use public transportation facilities on working days. As we all know, office worker always hurry in the morning and can not enjoy a good breakfast. Some of them even go to work without breakfast, which indeed have bad effective on their body health. Therefore, we regard them as our main potential customer and provide them much more choice for breakfast.

Strategies for B&B

Virtual Organization is required to specific strategies for maintaining the competitive advantage. Venkatraman & Henderson hold the view that virtualness as a strategy that reflects three vectors and three stages. Three vectors are customer interaction, asset configuration and knowledge leverage. Each vector has three stages. Stage one focuses on the task unites while stage two focuses at the organizational level on how to corporate and create economic value. The third stage emphasizes on inter organizational network to facilitate the multiple communities for development. As the table shows, it is the strategies for B&B.

The customer interaction vector copes with the new forms of interactions between companies and customers. B&B app allows the passengers who take on the bus choose their breakfast. Although passengers pay for their breakfast without actually seeing or tasting, they can rely on the previous reviews from other passengers and photos. Passengers also are able to review the restaurants by B&B app. To some extent, B&B app also reinforces customer communities by providing this platform to share their ideas about the restaurants.

The asset configuration focuses on acquiring critical assets and resources to greater alliance. The first stage of asset configuration is sourcing module. It deals with the benefits of efficiently sourcing standard modules or components. KMB and HK style tea restaurants operate like assembler. When KMB choose the partners, it considers which HK style tea restaurants are the nearest to their bus routes. Therefore, KMB routes connect with HK style tea restaurants. The second stage is establishing an app to gather information about the GPS traffics and meal orders. The last step is building a resource network. B&B app is a one stop platform which contains checking the bus routes, meal ordering, payment and comments.

The knowledge leverage is how to utilize knowledge assets to support strategy. The first stage is work-unit expertise. Bus routes system and meal ordering system assist KMB and HK style tea restaurants to create B&B apps. The second stage is corporate asset to harness the collective expertise across work units. B&B apps possess the information about the bus routes and meal order. The last stage is professional community expertise. KMB possesses the technology developers who modify the app and online marketing specialists to do the marketing research.

Reasons why we use virtual collaboration

In terms of the collaboration format, we choose cooperate via the virtual platform. This is due to several reasons. First of all, this virtual app will add common value for KMB and HK style tea restaurant community. We believe that a relax trip environment plus diversity breakfast will be more attractive than standing in a crowed railway train and the same fast food every morning. The second reason we go virtual collaboration because the virtual world indeed has some advantages. For example, the virtual platform allows our app easy to get for every potential customer which help us to promotion the products. Additionally, virtual organizations save lot of space and cost to build, such as infrastructure cost and the cost of resource utilization. The virtual platform also easier to management compared with organizations in reality since we can keep a database to follow all the data about customers’ feedbacks, their preference, etc. Then, we can analyze those data at a fixed period to find out more useful information, so that we can adjust out service in time and provide better service to our customers. Another reason is that virtual platform makes our collaboration more efficiency and reduces existing disadvantages of both KMB and HK style tea restaurants. These two partners are already having the physical resource. What they need is a virtual platform to collaborate and to conquer their weaknesses in reality. Therefore, they set up the B&B app to achieve win-win collaboration.

Skills required for collaboration

During the process of building the virtual organization, it needs several skills to facilitate mutual cooperation.

Knowledge management

Knowledge management is regarded as recognizing and managing organization’s intellectual resources to achieve business goal. There are five stages in the knowledge management model. The first step is capture. Since capturing knowledge from employees and customers is critical to the development of a knowledge base, our HK style tea restaurants can capture the customers’ comments from the B&B app to decide whether we need to perfect our service. The second step is storage. After capturing the raw data, the primary challenge is to identify which data are relevant to our HK style tea restaurants. The third step is interpretation and transformation. Our HK style tea restaurants need to generalize ideas from customers. Next step is dissemination. When disseminating organizational knowledge, it ought to concern the security and utility by potential users. When our HK style tea restaurants receive excellent suggestions from customers, we have to think about whether OpernRice will take advantage of them. Last step is audit. Some comments are subjective, so we will check the validity and reliability of reviews.

There are three key advantages about utilizing knowledge management. First of all, knowledge management technologies can deliver the right information to our HK style tea restaurants at the right time. Second, knowledge management technology can store human intelligence and experience which assist our HK style tea restaurants to provide better service for our customers. The last is knowledge management technology can distribute human intelligence.

Communication

   

Organizational communication is one of the basic functions of organizational management. It can increase the mutual understanding among the members in the organization and ensure the information flow. Communication in virtual organization is significant for two reasons: firstly, it is necessary to equip employees with information to do their work and share information. Secondly, the demand of virtual organization is to improve performance.

In order to guarantee the mutual understanding between KMB and our HK style tea restaurants, we select one manager. It is necessary for manager to utilize communication in administrative activities, such as decision-making, problem-solving, motivating etc. This manager is obligated to communicate the virtual organization goals and direction to ensure all members focusing on the same targets. Besides, manger ought to provide formal and informal communication channels for employees. The main types of formal communication are downward, upward and horizontal. In this type of communication, each employee knows who they report to, who they are controlled by, what their authority is and whom to consult when confronting problems. Informal communication is a casual form of information sharing like E-mail, instant messaging and text messaging etc. These two types of communication channels can ensure employees to receive information and give feedbacks to our HK style tea restaurants.

Solve Conflict

Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Model assesses an individual’s behavior in conflict situations and describes a person’s behavior along assertiveness and cooperativeness. Assertiveness, the extent to which the individual intends to satisfy his or her own concerns while the cooperativeness, the extent to which the individual attempts to satisfy the other person’s concerns. These two dimensions of behavior can be applied into five methods of dealing with conflict.

From the table above, there are five methods of dealing with the conflict: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating. Our HK style tea restaurants ought to avoid the fast food chains, because we do not have the enough power to compete with them directly. Since KMB has strong bargaining power, it will exit some possible conflicts between our HK style tea restaurants and KMB. One is unfairness. Due to unclear standard of choosing partners, KMB may reject some HK style tea restaurants which also attempt to cooperate with KMB.  The other is compulsory treaty.  KMB may set up several compulsory treaties which are disadvantage for us. Although KMB has strong bargaining power than us, we can collaborate with each other to solve the conflicts. During the whole process, our manager and their manager should discuss the strategies and make decisions together. Additionally, we can establish common goals, such as maximizing profits and attracting more customers, to facilitate collaboration.

Win-win negotiation

The last skill is win-win negotiation which intends to find out a strategy for the two companies to maximize the profits. One of the negotiation tips is expanding the pie. If we focus on dividing the pie, we will become enemies. If we attempt to expand the pie, we should work together. Although our HK style tea restaurants and KMB have complex benefit-based relationship, we decide to expend the pie to balance the profit. However, there are several possible problems existing in the negotiation. One of the possible problems we conceive of is that the two parties have different preferences and perspectives that will lead to a conflict in the negotiation process. The corporation of the HK-style tea restaurants and the KMB is a brand new collaboration between two different industries. Thus, it is hard to define the ownership and the other benefits. In order to achieve the win-win situation, we will let KMB share the expectations and perspectives first. For example, our HK style tea restaurants and KMB discuss the acceptable risk together and analysis factors which may have effect on both sides. Another problem is that we may use the fixed-pie perspective, that is to say the negotiators often believe that the other party’s interest is directly opposed to their own interest. This often damages the trust between two sides and leads to lose-lose outcome.

In order to avoid this situation, we will try to maximize the mutual profit to build trust between the two companies. One of the solution is to offer package deal, that enables two companies to uttermost utilize the resource to gain profit. For example, the KMB can offer in-bus advertisement for our tea restaurants as an attached offer in the contract. In this way, both sides find a way to maximize their mutual benefit. Additionally, it can facilitate their relationship which assists them to achieve a win-win situation. Another solution is to offer more choices. As a negotiator, we need to provide more possibilities to let them choose. We are required to offer at least two proposals with equal economic value for others and KMB can choose one that in accordance with their strategy. This negotiation strategy can build mutual trust because it respects participators during the negotiation process. Moreover, the trust between the two companies can guarantee the win-win negotiation. We believe that by applying these solutions, we can eventually have a win-win negotiation and build a concrete base for the collaboration between two companies.

We also have confidence in the incentives of customers’ return because the HK-style tea restaurants have its own characteristic. it is a signal of the life style in HK and it can provide a lot of service that the large fast food restaurant chain cannot provide, the HK style café’s advantage is its variety and flexibility, also the distribution of the stores makes it convenient to the costumers, these are all considered to be the differentiation of the HK style café on the other hand, the collaboration with the KMB enable the HK style café to take advantage of the resource of the KMB this is a win-win collaboration.

Incentives for customer return

In order to encourage customers to utilize our B&B apps, we will reward our customers. Based on their number of comments, we can give customers discounts. Every month, we can hold the lucky draw activity. Customers who review our HK style tea restaurants have the opportunities to be a lucky dog. We will give gifts or coupons to those special customers.

Conclusion

Our view on the future of this virtual collaboration is that it can be an everyday tool to the customers who choose it. Our motto is ‘enjoy food hunting anytime everywhere’ this is exactly what we can provide for the customers. In the future this virtual collaboration platform can become an independent platform and be outsourced to gain further profit.

References

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