Overview

Asha Tea House is a drink shop in Berkeley. Boba tea, the main product of Asha Tea House, is a Taiwanese tea-based drink, which usually mixed with fruit or milk and can be customized with chewy tapioca balls or other ingredients. In addition to sell cooked tea in shop, Asha also has an online shop selling the raw tea.As a Taiwanese, I found Asha Tea House interesting for its unique atmosphere based on the blend of the traditional Taiwanese Tea culture with US cosmopolitan café shop style. Asha tries to convey the oriental tea knowledge and culture to the customers and maintain long-term relationship with the customers by providing close interactions. This uniqueness distinguishes Asha Tea House from the other boba tea shops in Taiwan and Bay Area.

What resources are being used?

Just like the other profit-oriented cooperation, Asha Tea House has to organize many resources to maintain the business, including human resources, consumer resources, stock resources, knowledge resources, etc. Among these resources, I would like to specify in their stock resources and knowledge resources.As mentioned before, there are many different variants of boba tea and many ingredients can add to. Although the items on menu of Asha Tea House is simpler than other boba tea shop, there are still about 20 different kinds of tea. And the stocks not only includes 16 different species of raw tea, the raw tapioca ball, condensed milk, fruit puree, syrup also expand the scale of stock resources.

For the knowledge resources, Asha Tea House has to transform the abstract knowledge into a concrete information as to convey to their staff and the customers. They have to deal with not only the standardized process to make tea and prepare ingredients, but also the deeper knowledge of traditional Taiwanese tea culture and species of tea. Since Asha is not only selling tea as an “drink item”, but more like selling “drinking tea” as a life style, they put a lot of effort to tell the story behind every single cup of tea. In the shop, you can see the big-size photos of Taiwan tea farm, where all the tea served in store comes from, bringing more live scene for customers to picture. Also, you can get more well-organized guidance information on their online store. All of these are the knowledge resources they have to organize.

Why are the resources organized?

The resources are organized to improve the efficiency of certain interactions. For the stock resources, since the tea and ingredients are well organized into different category, it will provide a more efficient interaction of retrieval. And although the barista is the one having direct interaction of retrieving the tea, the efficiency is not just meant for the barista staff but also for the customers who are waiting for barista to make the order. To sum up, we can say that the efficiency leveraged by organization can be beneficial to the people both involved direct and indirect with certain interactions.Moreover, organizing not only provides the efficiency but also provides a better understanding. For the mission of tea culture education, the well-organized guidelines answer the most common questions and thus provide a easy way for customers to have deep understandings about tea.

How much are the resources organized?

Since there is currently one shop only and the number of staff is small, the stock resources are not organized into many hierarchies and granulated. For the tea part, different tea species are first categorized into black tea/ green tea/ oolong tea and then organized by their quality level and location of the tea farm.

When are the resources organized?

Asha Tea House change the menu seasonally, so when the menu is modified, it means the organizing system of stock has to be redesigned as to update the transition of the ingredients. For the knowledge resources, since the knowledge of tea should be persistent as to serve the same quality and taste, so most of the knowledge resource will not be reorganized frequently. However, if the manager does come up with some new stories about the tea, at that time, the knowledge resources will be reorganized.

Who does the organizing?

The owner of the Asha Tea House. Since it is relatively a small business, I supposed the owner can mostly decide most of the organizing principle. After the organizing schema is set, the staff team can follow the organizing schema but also giving suggestions to improve the organizing.

Other considerations

Currently there is only one shop for Asha Tea House to maintain, so the scope and complexity of the organizing system is relative small. However, from a report, I learned that the owner of Asha is thinking to open more shops in the near future. When it becomes chained-store, the organizing system will have to redesign as to interact with more people.