And Mitch Green, the newly hired executive director of FSA-which provides a variety of services to the university-has found his first major task in addressing the results of a consultant's report focusing on FSA's dining services.

The evaluation, conducted earlier this year by a research group affiliated with Marriott International, Inc., identified several problems to be addressed by FSA. They include low customer satisfaction with the existing food service and problems in FSA management.

FSA, which operates on campus under a contract with SUNY, is administered by a board of directors drawn from campus faculty, staff and students. In addition to dining services, FSA also provides recreational services, dry cleaning and laundry services, administers the UBCard ID-card program and has a number of other functions.

Green, who was hired in August and has his home base in the Statler Commissary, is focusing on addressing the problems in FSA's dining, catering, vending and retail sales.

"We have to look at changing the organization of people responsible (for food service)," Green said. With regard to patrons, and especially students in the dormitories, Green said there can't be a mindset of simply "we're happy to have them."

Rather, "We're in a competitive environment and we have to respond to that," he said. The job now, he says, is to "make sure we're operating on good business practices and not on historical practices."

Green worked as a food contractor for colleges for 10 years prior to his recent appointment. Most recently, he was with the Rochester-based Fine Host Corp. Before that, he was employed by several universities in the food-service area and his experience totals 20-plus years.

Much of what is included in the Marriott report "has real validity," Green said, especially criticisms of "how we present our services to the campus, the quality of our services, the timeliness of our services and organizational structure."

The report included analysis of data, consumer-need and satisfaction reviews, benchmarking against peer institutions, operations and facilities audits and analysis of management structures.

Consultants conducted site visits and met with key campus constituencies in an effort to provide UB with recommendations on success factors, customer satisfaction, and cost and budgeting models for FSA and campus consideration.

According to Cliff Wilson, associate vice president for student affairs, Green has what it takes to put a plan into action. "He has wonderful experiences in private enterprises that run food-service operations around the country. He brings a whole variant of experience to the campus that we desperately need."

Wilson said the report focused on what services FSA should be offering and what customers really want.

"They were very good at pointing out what we do well and what we do poorly," Green said. "They didn't give us any real implementation plans."

It's up to him to help turn the "blueprint" into reality.

So what's been done to put the plan into action?

"We renovated the Goodyear dining hall," Green said, "with a different style of service, which is running quite nicely. We also put an...ice cream and pretzel concept in the Student Union. Those two projects are basically completed."

The $250,000 physical overhaul of the Goodyear dining area on UB's South Campus has made the facility almost unrecognizable from its previous state. "Goodyear used to be your typical, straight-line cafeteria," Green said. But now, in addition to new furniture, the facility was transformed over the summer into a marche-type dining hall.

Students see their food prepared "up front," and several different stations offer a variety of foods like pastas, sautéed vegetables, tortillas and pizza.

"We've tried to break up that area and incorporate the kitchen into the serving area so food is prepared close to its point-of-service and students can see the food being prepared." Green said. "There's nothing hidden, and there's much more variety than we've ever had."

Student feedback regarding the changes at Goodyear has been "very positive," Green said.

For breakfast and dinner, dormitory students on the regular meal plan get an all-you-can-eat ticket to the different stations, which also include an ice-cream station, a deli-bar and a "Char 'n Grill" station for sandwiches, submarines and hamburgers.

Looking to the future, Green says the same concepts are being examined for the Governor's Residence Halls, and plans are under way for a major overhaul of facilities on the North Campus.

The Marriott report indicated it might be more efficient to consolidate the three major feeding areas in the Ellicott Complex: the Red Jacket and Richmond dining areas and the Student Club. There also is the possibility of building an addition to the Ellicott Complex to accommodate the change.

"We're trying to bring together all the groups that this would affect. I need to talk with residence life, student activities and the housing folks to see what we're going to do. We need to get people from the physical plant involved and see how viable it is to renovate that space."

One of the major reasons to make changes, Green said, is the fact that "our customer base has changed" over 20 years. In the past, "there was a mindset that the students would live on campus, eat three meals a day here and that they wouldn't be very mobile."

But now, "we have a very mobile customer in our student population. Students have cars. There's Pizza Hut, there's (all types of businesses) that can deliver food."

"We're in a very competitive environment and we have to respond to that competition."