to buy a house This large price range brought with it the additional benefit of a wider appeal to customers from all income levels. While all these important and exciting marketing developments were being planned and executed, a great deal of attention and study was being devoted to the second part of the business problem, namely, the establishment and development of appropriate techniques of Executive management. The most important of these come under the headings of Work Study, Material Usage Control, Management Accounting, and Management Organization. Few of these could be devised, let alone applied, before the marketing changes had been successfully effected, and to this day some are still not fully developed. It was also realized at this time that the challenge would also demand an executive with different skills than those which had been acquired during the past decades of catering and the first manager was selected for training, incidentally, not from within the field of existing restaurant management but from the Organization and Methods Division of the Company. At the same time, as early as 1948, the first steps were taken to establish and develop the technique of work study, for it was realized that the most significant cost and the most challenging problem concerned labour. The Company already employed an extensive work study service for its factories, and a team was detached to study the problems concerning the catering business in the hope that they could apply their techniques in this new field. It is as well to consider the nature of this challenge, for whereas in the environment of mass production within the Lyons factories there was usually A specified single endproduct; A predetermined demand; A specified plant capacity; and r An environment which could be subordinated to the main task of production there was within the catering industry by comparison No single endproduct other than a meal which varied according to the desires of every individual customer and which could only be known minutes before the need for its production and service; A variable demand, which could never be known with certainty but which almost certainly would be subject to substantial peaks and troughs, due entirely to the eatingout habits of the public; Variable plant capacity, because in a domestic service such as catering most items of plant have many uses all of which may be called upon in a short period of time; and An environment which could not be subordinated to the task of production and service alone but which also had to allow for the merchandising requirements of the restaurateur. In short, every customer presented a new situation, and work study techniques had to be applied, not in the light of known dependable facts, but rather on the basis of probability, maybe possibility, and at the worst, upon little more than inspired guesswork. This challenge was met, and work study was developed within the Corner Houses; it was, as far as is known, the first time that this technique had been successfully applied within this industry. homemoney to purchasehow