A Complaint toward the Lamb Meat Dear Sir, As the Store Manager for the Gemilang Hypermarket, it is my duty

to report any complaints to you sir as the Branch Manager. This matter has just happen yesterday and it needs your immediate attention. Yesterday evening at 6.50pm, we received our first complaint towards the lamb meat that is just in store. One particular customer, named Ahmad Hashim, complained about his meat being smelly and had a bad taste. He bought 3kg of lamb meat worth RM15 per kilogram at 5pm and straight away returned it at 6.30pm. We duly refund him his money and promised him that this matter will be brought forward to our Branch Manager. He accepted it and promised to come back again next time, due to our excellent customer service which we had just provided him just now. We the workers are part of the Gemilang Hypermarket and it is our duty to provide our customers the best service they should had. And again at about 8.00pm and 9.00pm, we received another two complaints about the lamb meat. But as for the lamb meat, we stopped selling them as soon as we received the first complaint. Long Leng Seng, the 2nd complainer, and Ravi A/L Muthu as the 3rd complainer. Both of them had the same problem too, the lamb meat had a rotten and had smelly taste into it. We gave them their refunds and our promise to them towards solving this matter as soon as possible. These are the few reasons on why I should file a complaint report letter. This is to prevent this matter from becoming worse in the future. In this case, I have compiled a lists of happenings that may led towards this shortcoming, this is to prevent this thing from happening ever again. I as the Store Manager felt heavily responsible on this fiasco and I am doing my best to solve it. As for the proposals, I propose that Gemilang Hypermarket should remove all the spoiled meat and do a thorough checking into it. Then we will know what happen to the lamb meat and we can also figure out ways to rectify it. After we know what happened to meat, then we can find the source of this meat rotten problem. Is it from us, the supplier, or both? As for the checking, the conduct of it should be thorough and detail. This will help us on finding ways to improve while serving our customers better than ever before. Thus after doing our investigation, I and my fellow workers have sum up a few possible solutions.

In this present situation, I have identified 4 possible problems on how the lamb meat became rotten and smelly. This after consulting my workers and asked them about the possibilities on how the meats became spoiled. Nizam, Jamil, Chee Keong, Jason and Imen have all given me their insights and ways to prevent it getting worse than before. After hearing them out and after a few discussions, there are tons of what may be the cause of this serious mishap of lamb disaster and I have sum up the whole discussion process to be forwarded to you sir as the Branch Manager. This first possible scenario towards this nuisance is that the meat has been put up in the freezer for far too long. This comes from my source that the meat has been inside the freezer for weeks now. While checking up on the meat, I notice that the According to an article from ehow.com, the meat should be pinkish (light or dark) without any gray or tan colours. Gray and tan colours indicate bacteria on the meat. As from what I see in the meats, the colours were dark red, a bit of reddish colour. These definitely spell some bad troubles and bad rating for the store. What I suggest is we should improve the delivery times for the meat. Since our meats only being delivered to us after one week of processing, maybe we should improve it by a day or two. As for the cost, the supplier may demands more from us, due to short timeframe that they had. Another suggestion is that we should place our orders according to the demand that we received. This could save us the losses of having to thrown out the meats that we cannot sell. As for the meat, if the supplier decided to send out more than we ordered, it is best that we just rejected it, thus saving us from having to deal with meats that are going to go bad in a day or two if we did not keep it properly. And according to mideastfood.about.com, If lamb will not be used within a couple of days, it must be frozen. Make sure your freezer keeps a steady temperature of 0 degrees or below. Therefore it is important for us to keep or freezer in the 0 degrees which is suitable enough for the meat to be stored. In our freezer, it is possible that the freezer might experience a bit of a malfunction, hence turning the lamb meat into the smelly lamb meat that we know. Thus a big investment towards the freezer might help sort this problem out. The second possible scenario is that there are some mishandling cases that have not been reported yet. I managed to ask my workers about it and they confessed on about a few of them having mistakenly dropped the meat in the ground. This is some serious case here

and I cannot tolerate with them on this anymore. Nizam admitted that in one or two occasions that he had drop the lamb meat into the floor without noticing it for about half an hour. And when he realizes it, he just lift it back up and pretend nothing goes wrong. In his defence, he said that he is afraid that he will lose his job if anyone would ever find out about it. I seriously reprimand him on his action for that.

As for this, I propose that we need to find better skilled workers for our meat department, hiring a few school leavers would not help us out much. Therefore hiring a few skilled workers can help us improve efficiency and qualities of our meat and service. Although hiring them would prove costly, this is a chance for us to make things right, while giving our customer the satisfaction that they should have.

These are the requirements that workers should have: loading meat products into trucks packing boned and sliced meat into cartons packing fish and counting packs before freezing, and packing frozen fish blocks into cartons cleaning and sanitising equipment and work areas

If we cannot find new workers for this post, maybe we should train them and teach them the ways on how to handle lamb meat in a more effective and productive way. With training, the work rate of our workers will increase dramatically And According to Ben Horowitz (2010), Ironically, the biggest inhibitor to putting a training program in place is the perception that it will take too much time. Keep in mind, that there is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company.

And according to Ben Horowitz (2010) again, these are the few reasons on why we should train our workers 1. Productivity If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in you subordinates performance, you company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours. 2. Performance Management If you dont train your people, you establish no basis for performance management. As a result, performance management in your company will be sloppy and inconsistent. 3. Product Quality As success drives the need to hire new engineers at a rapid rate, companies neglect to train the new engineers properly. As the engineers are assigned tasks, they figure out how to complete them as best they can. Often this means replicating existing facilities in the architecture, which lead to inconsistencies in the user experience, performance problems, and a general mess. And you thought training was expensive. 4. Employee Retention During a time of particularly high attrition at Netscape, I decided to read all of the exit interviews for the entire company to better understand why people quit hi-tech companies. After putting economics, aside, I found that there were two primary reasons why people quit: 1. They hated their manager generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development and feedback they were receiving. 2. They werent learning anything the company wasnt investing in the employees. Another possible scenario for this spoiled meat is that our storage facility is not up to date to the current standard. According to P. Kendall (2011), in an refrigerator state (0-5 Celsius degree), lamb meat can only be kept for only 2 to 4 days, while in a freezer state (which is in -17 Celsius). The lamb meat can be stored from 6 to 9 months.

From what I observed, our freezers in the storage facility have issues in maintaining the supposed temperature that we must keep. Old technologies have prevented the freezer from keeping a consistent -17 Celsius. The temperature fluctuates from -17 to 0 and sometimes to 10 degree Celsius. With temperatures like this, it is hard for us to know the exact date when the lamb meat is going bad. This may be one of the reason on why our meat have gone bad even though we have been doing our regular checking for quite some time now.

Thus, we must invest heavily on a freezer that is highly capable in maintaining regular temperature and can storage up to 300kg of lamb meat. This is important so that we can store our meat in a large quantity while preserving its freshness in a control and regulated temperature. Although this piece of equipment is expensive and may reach tens of thousands of Ringgit Malaysia, but the return investment for it can reach more than tens of thousands of ringgit. This is what I hope Gemilang Hypermarket can achieve.

Speaking about storage facilities, the cleanliness inside it must be taken serious as well. From mishandling workers, to cleaners doing their part in perpetuate freshness of our meat. Cleanliness are vital for the meat to be preserved in a much better way. Therefore, cleaners and workers alike in our hypermarket should be train and be taught the better way of doing their jobs. But the Gemilang Hypermarket must also provide them the necessary equipment for them to do their part of the job. With proper equipment and training, our workers can give their full commitment in doing their job. While it may cost a bit more than our usual budget, it is one of the key reasons in preserving the meat from being infected by dirty bacteria or germs that may speed up the rotten process.

According recipetips.com, the best way to store lamb meat are During food preparation, it is very important to wash your hands often to help prevent the transfer of harmful bacteria from one food item to the next. For example, when handling raw meat, you should wash your hands thoroughly before chopping vegetables to reduce the risk of transferring bacteria from the meat to the vegetables. The knife that was used to cut raw lamb should not be used to chop vegetables unless the knife has been washed thoroughly first.

For the fourth possible scenario, I suspect that the quality of our meat is below par then what we are supposed to receive. Me and my workers have been checking up on the meats and have discovered that they may have lack the freshness of a lamb meat. I figure that these meats must have been put away inside the suppliers freezer for quite some time now. Although the rotten problem have only been showing up yesterday, but my workers have long been suspicious with the meat. And their guess is true when yesterday one of the meats goes rotten. I also been telling them that they should tell me anything if they suspicious on something. When I start and asking around the customers here regarding the lamb meat, they too agree that our meet had not been up to the standard.

According to the United States Food Safety and Inspection Service, Optimum surface color of fresh meat (i.e., cherry-red for beef; dark cherry-red for lamb; grayish-pink for pork; and pale pink for veal) is highly unstable and short-lived.

With that being said, our lamb meats are mostly dark cherry red and this is not what our customers want. Lamb meats that are in pink or light red are the ones that we should be on the lookout for. These have been going on for a few weeks now since we started our dealing from our supplier.

With this, I am suggesting two options. One, we make a demand to our supplier for them to give us a high quality meat. Or two, we change our current supplier to a new supplier.

For the old supplier, we demand that they change their low substandard meat into a high quality reliable lamb meat. As for the costs, if they decided to ask for more, I suggest that we do not give them, because we already sign up our agreement which enables us to get high quality meats at a right price. But by giving us low quality meat, they are not living up to the standard and by right, we could sue them.

If the current supplier still did not want to balk up on our condition, we should change our supplier into a new and reliable supplier. I suggest that we pick supplier that can give us a better quality lamb meat than the current supplier that we had. We might as choose a supplier that can give us consistently high quality of meat rather than supplier who balk up on their promise. As for the cost, it might be costly if we were to import our lamb meat from a high

quality and proven supplier, but that should not be case for our hypermarket because our customers demand the best, and by right we should give them the best too.

As a conclusion, I hope that all of these strategies and recommendations can be followed up and be made as soon as possible. Even though there are different kinds of possible scenario on how this matter happens, we should analyse each one of them carefully without making any hastily judgement. Hence the reason why this report is as comprehensive as it can be.

The changes that will be made in the future should not be a sign for the other workers that their job is in danger, and as a matter of fact, these changes can help them doing their job more precisely and efficiently. They should not be afraid of changes that are going to be made in the hypermarket, but more importantly, they should be happy and glad that their jobs will be easier and more productively for them to continue their job.

Changes at a workplace are important for a team and it is my best interest that these changes may help us in our future upbringing. These recommendations are some of the best possible ways to help us improve our service to our customers.

Yours Truly,

Leonard Leonidas Store Manager Gemilang Hypermarket.

Kathryn

Hatter,

(2011)

How

to

Detect

Spoiled

Lamb

Meat,

Retrieved

from

http://www.ehow.com/how_5796765_detect-spoiled-lamb-meat.html Australian Government (2001) Meat, Poultry and Seafood Process Workers, Retrieved from http://joboutlook.gov.au/pages/occupation.aspx?code=8313 Ben Horowitz (2010) Why It's Crucial To Train Your Employees, Retrieved from http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-0517/strategy/30098342_1_managers-trainingproductivity/2#ixzz1cHEIS6br Saad Fayed (2011) How to Select the Best Cut of Lamb , Retrieved from http://mideastfood.about.com/od/tipsandtechniques/a/selectinglamb.htm Elizabeth Angeli, Jodi Wagner, Elena Lawrick, Kristen Moore, Michael Anderson, Lars Soderlun, Allen Brizee, Russel Keck (2011) Reference List: Electronic Sources (Web Publications) Retrieved from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/ Peggy Trowbridge Filippone (2011) How to store and select lamb Retrieved from http://homecooking.about.com/od/foodstorage/a/lambstorage.htm P. Kendall and N. Dimond (2007) Food Storage for Safety and Quality Retrieved from http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/foodnut/09310.html