Fine Harvest Restaurant Group

The Fine Harvest Restaurant Group cases A and B examine a company's design of a new system to evaluate the performance (and determine the bonuses) for its restaurant managers. Fine Harvest had traditionally evaluated restaurant managers based on store margins and had not given enough consideration to the performance potential that the stores had when setting targets. In response to several restaurant managers' complaints that the performance evaluation system was unfair and incomplete, the top executives of the company hired a consultant to revise the measures and targets used to evaluate performance. The new performance evaluation plan aimed to (a) account for different drivers of performance at the restaurant level; and (b) assess the performance of each restaurant relative to a peer group operating under similar conditions. Students are provided with detailed databases including the performance measures used to evaluate the restaurant managers under the existing and proposed system.

The Fine Harvest teaching note describes an assignment that can be used by an instructor as a class project. The assignment asks students to apply statistical methods to conduct several analyses aimed at evaluating the quality of the existing and proposed restaurant manager performance evaluation systems.