Assignment: GastroPOP is a food and catering provider that is growing rapidly in Singapore and has plans to expand into the ASEAN market. The story of GastroPOP started with the CEO

Human Capital Measurement – People Analytics & AI Workforce Background

GastroPOP is a food and catering provider that is growing rapidly in Singapore and has plans to expand into the ASEAN market. The story of GastroPOP started with the CEO, Rumi Sagar who graduated from Culinary Institute of America and worked in several Michelin Star restaurants internationally. While she is interested in creating gastronomic food, she also wants these dishes to be appreciated by a larger group of customers. Rumi felt that gastronomy need not be overly expensive and gastronomy can be accessible for the growing middle-class population in the region. This journey started as a home-run kitchen and have expanded to be established as the leading gourmet food and catering provider in Singapore. Having grown up within a family-owned business conglomerate, Rumi understood how to run a business. GastroPOP food and catering business is one of the few businesses that serves gourmet food that has an integrated value chain from food production to events. According to one interview, Rumi wants GastroPOP’s to be the foremost in gastronomic food and catering in the region. To do so, GastroPOP’s need to capture the heart and mind by creating experiences through taste, depth, and meaning of each course. In 2025, GastroPOP has managed to record over $50 million in revenue. GastroPOP has also received several recognitions including Singapore’s SME Excellence Award and Prestige 100 Singapore Award.

GastroPOP comprises of several key units. The business development department is responsible for client servicing and new business development. The food innovation department is the company’s research and development arm. This department creates new recipes and dishes so that it continues to offer unique food experiences for their clients. The operations department manages the central kitchen, manufacturing facilities, and warehouses to ensure efficiency and quality control. The sustainability department sources with both local and international farmers and food producers to ensure that the quality of ingredients are obtained at the highest quality with the lowest cost.

The synergies between these four units are crucial to achieve GastroPOP’s vision and stay on top of the competition. As part of the key performance indicators, the senior leadership tracks critical business outputs such as client satisfaction, new product innovation, and sales. For client satisfaction, the senior leadership tracks the satisfaction score that client complete after service delivery. New product introduction measures the number of new dishes or improved processes that has been developed. Sales is measured as the revenue generated from the food and catering sales.

Employee Engagement

Due to the rapid growth of the company especially in the number of employees, the CEO is unable to attend to each employee personally unlike the days when it was just started. Rumi observed that her staff is not as energised and motivated as before, especially those at front lines. Therefore, she has spoken with the Chief People Officer (CPO), Jinu Gomez on how this can be tracked and the likely factors associated with this. Jinu worked together with a consultant and constructed the GastroPOP Workforce Survey to measure the level of employee engagement and the associated factors that are known to predict employee engagement. This was conducted in January 2025. Appendix 1 lists the items for the survey and their associated factors.

Enabling the Workforce through AI.

After the survey was conducted, Jinu and the team organised Focus Group Discussions (FGD) to get a richer understanding of the issues face by staff. One key theme that was highlighted was the amount of administrative work that employees had to manage. Jinu discussed these findings with Rumi. Rumi spoke with the Head of Operations to see if they can use AI tools to manage the administrative work so that employees can focus on more higher value work. The Head of Operations suggested working with Enterprise Singapore as they have a Productivity Solutions Grant for local SMEs to help them automate certain processes. A team made up of interested employees from various departments was formed to be trained and to implement these tools across the company.

After three months of rolling out the new AI tools, Jinu monitored some outcomes of this AI pilot. In particularly, Jinu was interested in the improvement of workload across employees. Jinu asked the team to conduct a snap poll on 30 randomly selected employees who jobs were assisted by the AI tools. A composite index of workload was created by aggregating the mean of the items. The data from the poll was tagged to the data from the survey. However, these data were de identified so that the results are anonymous. Data set 2 consists of the composite index scores of workload at the time of the survey in January 2025 and the snap poll conducted after three months of rolling out the new AI tools.

Tasks

As the People Analytics Lead, you are required to produce a technical report to the CPO based on the following:

Describe and apply Fitz-Enz’s Human Capital-to-Enterprise pathway based on the information from the case vignette (Please exclude the human capital management level). (10 marks)

Apply the steps based on the scientific process in Bauer et al. (2019) for data set 1 (see Appendix 1) and prepare a data analysis report in the following manner (Please only apply analytic methods taught from this course, other analytic methods will NOT be marked): Apply the steps based on the scientific process in Bauer et al. (2019) for data set 1 (see Appendix 1): Identify the problem faced by the organisation and the purpose of the survey as indicated in data set 1. Conduct research (based on reputable academic journals) on the factors (i.e., independent variables) relating to the dependent variable as indicated in data set

1. From your research, briefly summarise the research that explains the relationship between each factor (i.e., independent variable) and the dependent variable. Then, develop hypotheses for each factor (i.e., independent variable) and its relationship with the dependent variable.

Analyse data set 1 in the following manner: Examine and report the reliabilities of each measurement scale. (Attach the SPSS output as Appendix 1 in your TMA). Explain an appropriate statistical analysis to use. Then analyse the data using the appropriate statistical analysis and report the descriptive statistics and the statistical analysis output and conclusions (You are required to recreate the required tables from the output in the main report. Then attach the SPSS output as Appendix 2 in your TMA). (45 marks)

Apply the following steps based on the scientific process in Bauer et al. (2019) for data set 2 (see HRM318-2026Jan-GastroPop-DataSet2-Workload.csv) and prepare a data analysis report in the following manner: Apply the steps based on the scientific process in Bauer et al. (2019) for data set 2 (see HRM318-2026Jan-GastroPop-DataSet2-Workload.csv): Identify the purpose of the study as indicated in data set 2. Develop a hypothesis. Analyse data set 2 in the following manner. First, explain an appropriate statistical analysis to use. Then analyse data set 2 using an appropriate statistical analysis and report the output and conclusions (You are required to create the required tables from the output in the main report. Then attach the SPSS output as Appendix 3 in your TMA). Rumi attended a business leader conference and was inspired by a session on harnessing AI. She agrees that companies will be left behind if they do not embrace the use of AI. Hence, she has tasked Jinu to work with vendors to upskill all her employees to be familiar with AI tools. Jinu worked with a training vendor to provide elearning on AI. Jinu discussed with Rumi and requires all employees to attain at least a basic competency level, while the team leads must attain at least a proficient competency level by the end of 2026. Team leads are also required to prepare a proposal to use AI to improve their processes. Rumi is also interested in determining the proportion of team leads that have the potential to develop their AI capabilities so that they can lead in process improvement. Propose TWO (2) metrics that will be useful for GastroPOP. Please describe the metric and explain how metric’s score can be useful for the CPO.