Pizza Hut Vs Domino

PIZZA HUT- HISTORY

Pizza Hut is the largest operating pizza chain in the world with over 12000 restaurants and delivery units worldwide. It was started in 1958 by Dan and Frank Carney in Wichita, Kansas. The first franchise agreement was signed in 1959. The chain quickly grew to 1000 franchises and restaurants in the first 14 years of its existence, which then tripled in the next 5 years. Today, Pizza Hut is a worldwide iconic brand and is holding its own in an increasingly competitive market (Pizza Hut, 2011).

HR and Competitive Advantage

Warren Buffet talks about the need for a business to have a competitive advantage to be a market leader. By competitive advantage he does not refer to the people involved in the making of the product, but rather the nature of the product or service in itself. In this report, we will attempt to challenge this view of Mr Buffet and demonstrate how HR can contribute to the building of competitive advantage. He also goes on to say that durable advantage belongs to those products that serve a repetitive need and do not need continuous R&D. To this extent, he believes that Pizza Hut enjoys durable competitive advantage (Hubby, 2011). The five dimensions of competitiveness are dependability, cost, quality, speed and flexibility.

We believe that Pizza Hut competes in the areas of cost, speed, dependability and quality.

Michael Porter in his book ‘Competitive Advantage ‘(1985) introduced the concept of a generic value chain that are used by companies to gain an advantage. He also talks about how HR supports this idea of competitive advantage through activities like recruiting, compensation, hiring and training and development (Net MBA , 2010).

We can see that Pizza Hut applies these principles through its HR in order to sustain its core advantage.

Cost: Pizza Hut sustains its cost advantage through its recruiting policy. Most of the kitchen staff recruited at Pizza hut is young high school or college students. As a result, the wages that are required to be paid are lower. The money that is saved by the company through this is then passed on to the customers in the form of lower costs. Another way in which HR supports the cost advantage is through training its recruits