How Harrods serves up process excellence in its restaurants & kitchens

Luxury department store Harrods is synonymous with excellence. Having opened in 1905, Harrods now welcomes an estimated 15 million visitors annually, many of whom frequent the 25+ different restaurants and bars located within the department store. The dining options range from world-class experiences to afternoon tea and cocktails.

Sam Munford leads process excellence across Harrods’ restaurants and kitchens, overseeing operations and ensuring processes meet the store’s famous high standards.

With over 17 years of experience, Munford is a dedicated process excellence and improvement leader with a passion for driving customer value and operational efficiency through transformational change, process optimization, strategic automation and effective business partnering. He is committed to continuous learning and sharing knowledge with others, striving to foster environments where innovation and efficiency can thrive.

In an exclusive interview, PEX Network sat down with Munford to discuss the role process excellence plays in Harrods’ restaurants and Kitchens, the factors that are key to success and overcoming challenges in a demanding environment.

PEX Network: How important is process excellence for Harrods’ restaurants and kitchens?

Sam Munford: At Harrods, we are the proud custodians of 25+ restaurants and process excellence is fundamental to both the experiences our guests expect across each dining destination and the behind-the-scenes magic that brings our operations to life.

We simplify processes with our customers and Harrodian colleagues at the heart of every decision. 

Over the past year we have centralized our approach to process – from site-specific thinking to a common approach – ensuring that we deliver exceptional culinary experiences at scale, whilst also maintaining the agility to innovate and respond to the latest trends and customer preferences.

PEX Network: In what ways does process excellence drive value?

SM: Process excellence in the form of simplified back-end operations enables the world-class service our teams deliver every day and this is something we are constantly looking to improve upon to ensure our colleagues are setup for success.

Last year saw our teams collaborate to simplify and improve our stock integrity processes, with great success, particularly in reducing wastage, driving sustainability and reducing restaurant stock loss by an incredible 70 percent year on year.

We’ve established leaner and more manageable processes for how we process service charge for our colleagues, ensuring that efficient processes are supported by training, knowledge artefacts and personal accountability.

Looking forward, we’re standardizing our approach to process discovery, embedding Lean Six Sigma-based frameworks and immersing our teams into a problem-solving mindset with continuous improvement at the heart of everything.

PEX Network: What factors are key to maintaining process excellence across Harrods’ restaurants and kitchens?

SM: I see process excellence as a jigsaw of problem statements waiting to be identified, solved and endlessly tweaked. The pieces will never fully align because our standards and the expectations of our customers are constantly evolving – that’s what makes process so exciting!

Sustaining process excellence relies on a continuous improvement culture, exceptional relationships, strong role-modeling of approach and data-driven decisions. In fact, I’m a firm believer that true excellence requires more than process – it demands a mindset of continuous reinvention! If we're not moving forward, we’re falling backward.

Technology plays a role too – from ERP systems to quick-fire surveys and self-serve dashboards. It is all invaluable insight that helps us to tell the story of where we should focus our attention for improvement. Ultimately, it’s about creating a shared problem-solving mindset.

PEX Network: What are the biggest process excellence challenges you face and how do you overcome them?

SM: Our biggest challenge is shifting from ‘operational survival’ to structured problem-solving across our diverse sites, brands and teams. With the next chandelier-laden restaurant launch always just around the corner, finding the time to hit ‘pause’ and take stock of the world around is always a challenge and is rarely a priority.

It is my role to not only identify and deliver improvement opportunities but also to sell the vision and journey to my teams and the rest of our division – “what could great really look like and how do we get there?”

With such a diverse portfolio of restaurants, there is huge risk in shoe-horning a one-size-fits-all approach into our processes. We must instead favor agility and flexibility to ensure that the customer experience is at the heart of everything and that cross-functional collaboration is as efficient as possible. 

The same goes for innovation – the experience one would wish to find in The Coffee Bar, amongst the hustle and bustle of our Food Halls is a far-cry from the experience one would find when spending an evening in the refined gastronomic masterpiece that is The Georgian. Selve-serve tabletop payment solutions might exist and work well for other brands, but is that what our customer really wants from us? Whilst technological improvements and process tweaks are out there, do they really fit in with our proposition, our customer experience and our Harrodian values?

PEX Network: What do you see as the biggest trends shaping process excellence in your sector?

SM: Greater digitization can drive efficiency for our operational colleagues, improve accuracy for our decision-makers and embed convenience for our customers. From inventory management to guest feedback to capacity management, there is huge opportunity to improve in line with the business’ values.

It’s hard to look past artificial intelligence (AI) when assessing the immediate future of process excellence in the retail and hospitality sectors. Whether that be through the use of AI to manage stock loss at till points or the use of predictive AI to manage the way we forecast our ordering of ingredients into our restaurants and production kitchens. 

For me, AI is now taking process excellence to the next level. Process modeling tools have been supported by process mining additives for some time and new-wave tech such as conversational AI and machine learning engines are making it easier than ever to derive decision-worthy insight from data and processes. 

Only just recently have I witnessed AI being used to simulate processes based on proposed full-time equivalent (FTE) tweaks to process models. It has never been so easy to discover problems and experiment with how one might solve them. Robotic process automation (RPA) may now see a bit ‘old-hat,’ but tools such as AI and machine learning mean we’re moving closer to true hyperautomation, where we can automate complex workflows instead of tasks alone.

It truly is an exciting time to be living and breathing process!

Image credit: Harrods

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