HTM students sharpening their knowledge through online simulations
January 29, 2021
Our Hospitality and Tourism Management program has been
known for unparalleled hands on approach through experiential learning. An important role in this approach plays the
simulation project that is successfully implemented in the Food and Beverage
Management class, taught by instructor Domagoj Nikolić.
You may wonder how simulations function within this course.
Well, aside from learning the theoretical aspects of running a restaurant in
terms of restaurant conceptualization, organization of F&B operations, menu
planning, budgeting as well as sales and marketing, student teams design four
restaurant menus (Appetizers, Mains, Soups & Salads and Desserts. The menus
comprise of 12 menu items, each reflecting the chosen restaurant concept. For
each dish, students identify and adjust recipes, source ingredients in
functioning online stores and determine the food cost. Once this has been done,
they perform the appropriate cost-based pricing technique and test and refine
each menu through menu engineering by using specially designed Excel
spreadsheets. At the end of this segment, students must demonstrate how
appropriate menu engineering strategies improve the profitability of each menu
item category and the overall profitability of the restaurant.
At that point students move to a professional online
simulation developed by Russel Partnerships which is powered by robust
algorithms. "This simulation demonstrates very realistically how menu items
perform in an environment where each one competes against all other. Here the
student knowledge is finally sharpened as they discover how to improve
restaurant profitability by applying dynamic sourcing/costing, pricing,
marketing and advertisement strategies”, says Domagoj Nikolić.
"At the end of the class, students present their project
outcomes to accomplished F&B professionals, who happen to be RIT Croatia
alumni. This time, we’ve had the honor to host Mr. Ivor Vlašić, Director of F&B Sales at
Adriatic Luxury Hotels and Mr. Branimir Boras, Assistant F&B Director at
Sun Gardens Dubrovnik, who evaluated nine team presentations and provided
invaluable feedback to the students. This year's peculiarity was that the
presentations were delivered on Zoom platform. Since the students worked
continuously for 13 weeks and were extremely well prepared, this did not take
away any quality. On the contrary, this was another important milestone in the
evolution of our program preparing students for always updated standard ways of
doing business” Domagoj Nikolić explains.
"We are extremely pleased with the quality we saw and
can affirm that exactly this type of knowledge is necessary for successful
F&B operations in today's competitive global marketplace. It is
particularly encouraging to see that the learning outcomes get better every
year, which means that the course is constantly upgraded," concluded Mr. Ivor Vlašić.
