At OpsAnalitica, we were the first to preach daily checklists and their benefits for running better and safer daily operations, improving visibility and managerial accountability using an app. While our competitors were preaching auditing your way to restaurant health, we knew that audits were incapable of driving behavior change at the restaurant level.
As we have done analysis on how our prospects/clients conducted their operations in the real world before using our app, what we realized is this, their process wasn’t broken, it was their tool that was broken. I’m speaking about paper based restaurant checklists and food safety systems.
Whether you print your checklists every week or your purchase the Red Book. It doesn’t matter, your checklist compliance, shift readiness, management accountability, safety processes, and record keeping are all suffering not because they aren’t well thought out or that you didn’t do a good job of training your teams, they’re suffering from the inherent weakness of paper.
Paper based systems have the following issues:
- Paper can’t proactively bubble up issues to management.
- Data on paper is essentially useless because it can’t be viewed by people who aren’t at the location and it is expensive and time consuming to get it into a database where it can be queried and used to make better decisions.
- You can’t hold your team accountable to following your paper based procedures – this is paper’s biggest weakness.
- Pencil Whipping, your managers aren’t using your systems as they were intended and your profits are suffering.
Now there is a better way to run your restaurants, a way to ensure that your teams are following your procedures every shift. A way to have issues bubbled up to management immediately so they can react quickly to squash them. A way to have real-time visibility into all of your restaurants from your phone, and to stop pencil whipping which directly affects customer satisfaction, sales and profits.
Ditch Paper and Go Digital. The OpsAnalitica Platform is cheap, less than the cost of the Red Book per month, and an easy replacement for your paper checklists. The benefits of using the system, as described above, we fix all the accountability and visibility issues that you have with paper. We do it by simply taking your current process and changing its medium from paper to a phone or tablet, that’s it.
Imagine a world where you go into your restaurants and your teams followed every procedure during their set-up. You conduct a spot check on your line and all you food had been temped and tasted and everything is exactly as it should be. You have a restaurant that welcomes a health inspection or 3rd party audit, because things are to spec. A restaurant where guests are excited to dine because they always have a good experience. That restaurant is completely possible and there is no secret on how to operate it.
It’s shift readiness and consistent execution. It’s blocking and tackling, it’s following your checklists every shift in every location. The thing is, you already have your procedures, you have already done the hard work of figuring out all the stuff your teams need to run your restaurants with perfection. The problem is they aren’t doing it and you can’t hold them accountable to doing it while you are using paper checklists as your system.
Paper based lack of accountability affects all restaurants; regardless of size, type, and revenue. Chains and single unit operators alike face the same issues when it comes to holding their managers accountable to following procedures.
I was talking to the members of the c-suite of a brewery restaurant chain. They were telling me how thorough and important their line checks were to their operations. How they audited the restaurants once a quarter and that they checked line check compliance on the audits. So I asked the question, are you auditors seeing 180 line checks when they audit? Everyone in the room just laughed. Oh yeah, they all get done, Ha Ha Ha.
What is that old quote, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. That is the restaurant industry when it comes to operations procedures and checklists. The restaurant industry spends tons of money and time figuring out the best way to run the restaurants to maximize customer satisfaction and efficiency. We are masters at figuring out how to run these restaurants, to simplify processes so they can be executed at the most base level. We are truly brilliant at that part of running restaurants.
The crazy part is, we don’t do a good job of holding anyone accountable to following any of our procedures. Because with paper it is too hard to do that effectively so we just don’t do it. We laugh about our teams not following our procedures and yet we spend a ton of money developing those procedures. Why spend the money developing them if no one is doing them?
That pencil whipping mentality is so ingrained in our operating culture because, once again, up until the invention of platforms like OpsAnalitica you couldn’t get the visibility or accountability you would need to stop it.
It’s time for a change, it’s time for restaurant operators to hold their teams accountable to following their procedures because that is their jobs and because when they don’t do it customer satisfaction, safety, sales, and profits all suffer.
If you would like to learn more about how the OpsAnalitica platform can change your business, click here.