Sunday, February 15, 2009

Main problem for small and medium bakery business

In most develop country we can see there are much small and medium type of bakery business running compare to big or large bakery production.Bakery business were grouped in food and beverage (f&b) industries.In present time, this economy catastrophe doesn't hurt much for f&b industries.It almost doesn't give any effect at all.Why?First of all when it comes to something about food or daily needs or services,government will try their best to keep it at low price so people still can get it.People do eat everyday,no matter how hard the economy be,they still need to eat.Can you imagine if one day when you go to the market and there is no bread or the price is too high that you can't afford to buy?This will cost unrest among the people and will causes much more problem to the government.

After being long time in this industries,i think the main problem for small and medium bakery business in Malaysia is not at the material cost or production cost,but its in man power source.For example in my country,employer can acquire cheap labour cost from foreign workers.Compare to local workers,their pay are much more higher than the foreign workers.There are pros and cons to this fact.In my experience,local workers were lack in disciplines and attitude.However,communication with them much more easier compare to foreign worker.I can trained and teach any new local workers how to make decent bread and make them understand how the entire production running in less than two weeks but for foreign workers that usually doesn't speak fluent English or Malays it can takes more than a month.

The problem with local workers is they're always doesn't give 100% commitment in their job.Or at least i can say,every workers should try to give their best at any job given.They should try to love their job instead of work just to get pay for it.When we enjoy our job,this can make our life more easier and cheerful.For examples,I'm actually graduate from computer networking degree but when i feel its hard for me to get decent job in this field,i think i should learn another different skills to add my value.Although this making bread & pastry skill doesn't related to each other,but i like to know how to make it.So i improved my skill and knowledge in this bakery industries until i can master it for myself.

I can say that i prefer working with foreign workers because they're actually come here to my country to earn money to feed their family back home.So they're more aware at their responsibilities and always work hard.But something that i don't like with foreign workers is they're too depend on each other.They're more likely to work in a group amongst them and this i can say "dangerous" for the company.Why is that?Let me give you one usual scenario:
Let say you manage or supervise medium bakery shop.You employ 3 foreign workers from Bangladesh.They're new to your country, doesn't speak fluent English,and know nothing about making bread or never work with its ingredients.First of all,you need to trained them to mix,shape and baked the bread.In the mean time,they need to learn memorise the name of the bread they make.They need to know exact ingredient and measurement for each type of bread and how to group them.Well like i said earlier,this learning process can take more than a month depend on their capability to adapt new knowledge.There are no problem if each of them work hard or show their effort to learn by any mean.But the problem occurs if one of them not given attention,or doesn't show interest to learn harder or in other word,lazy.When you try to fix this problem by acting straight in order to disciplined this worker,or the last result you fired the lazy one,there is 90% chances that another 2 of his friend will follow him to quit the job.When this happen,you now realise that all effort you give to teach and trained these 3 workers are useless.

This type of problem actually happen in most bakery shop in my country.The employer need to decide whether to employ locals or foreign worker.Both of them have pros and cons.The employer need to choose either low or high cost worker they need,but the stability in production is more critical for any business survival.Yes,what i can conclude here is having foreign worker will bring more stability in production but it'll need more patient and effort to make it successful choices.

Articles: Nourfadly80
Website: http://breadpastry.blogspot.com

9 comments:

Anonymous,  February 18, 2009 at 9:39 AM  

Just came across this blog ... very interesting information ... I used to run my own bakery.

Anonymous,  February 18, 2009 at 5:12 PM  

Thanks for the infos. Very useful indeed.

Sofia-Free ads April 6, 2009 at 10:42 PM  

I'm into baking and Making money out of my passion have been my desire for years now. Your post just gives me a lot of insights and points to consider. Thanks:-)

online poker August 23, 2009 at 5:59 AM  

so the best thing thing of the employer is to have patience to their employees. and that if possible never get employees which come from the same country.

Myles December 3, 2009 at 10:41 AM  

I think your right, it seems that hiring foreign workers work harder than local ones. But if one is being lazy most of the time the others would be on the lazy one's backside and would make a bigger fuss than what I would do.

art of cooking February 11, 2010 at 12:33 AM  

thank you for posting this! i already bookmarked you. im getting knowledge from you.

Ezrin Razlina November 29, 2010 at 2:09 PM  

Just came across your article. I'm currently running bakery business. I used to have a bakery shop last 2 years. Like you, I have experience with foreign workers (esp Indonesians) & also locals. I would agree with you that both have pros & cons. But, 1 thing I learned about them was, to employ any workers in any industries, you must find those who are really have interest in your business, despite they are locals or foreigners. Nowadays, foreigners without passport are very demanding. They gave you a lot of headaches & when you did not attend them, they will messed up their work. At the end, I received complaints from my customers. To me, I would prefer locals rather than foreigners.

Unknown May 26, 2011 at 6:50 PM  

I am running a bakery and cafe business. We serve breakfast and brunches in the form of freshly baked breads and pastries along with beverages like coffee and tea. Two years ago, I hired a couple of local school leavers to help us with chores of taking order and serving the food. They were OK on the first day. On the second day they came in late. On the third, they failed to turn up. On the fourth they sent "SMS" asking if they could skip work again. On the fifth I paid them what I owed them and told them not to come back ever again.
Fed up, I managed later to get two girls from Indonesia to sign a two year contract.On the whole both of them were OK except for the fact that somehow the first one was a "Luna Maya" wannabe! She continued working for me until end of her contract.
The second girl was quite a beauty but irritatingly a puritan and a male phobia. She would treat any gift as an attempt to lure her into illicit sex.a year into the contract she end up married to my customer a 62 years old "Ustaz" almost 40 years her senior.
Generally, foreign workers are easier to deal with although some negative human elements cannot be avoided.

domain registration india June 30, 2011 at 1:03 AM  

I am not familiar with this information. Definitely your blog will going to helpful for business mans.

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