Operations Data Use Cases Finale

In yesterday’s post, Operations Data Use Cases. We discussed two Ops Data use cases and how Ops Data could be used to make better decisions, drive better operations, and run more profitable restaurants.  In Today’s blog post, we are going to discuss one more use case and draw some conclusions.

Line Pars

Do you check that your different kitchen stations are stocked and that there is enough thawed product to meet your pars every shift?  More importantly do you track that metric so you refer can back to it when looking at sales.  Have you ever considered how much longer it takes to cook a frozen burger patty than a thawed patty?  I’ve heard that it can take up 50% longer to cook a frozen patty vs. thawed patty.  That is the difference between 4 minutes and 6 minutes per patty.  If you were to cook a case of burgers one after the other, the frozen patties would take 80 minutes longer to cook than the thawed patties.

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Ensuring that your line is stocked every shift with thawed product is massively important.  A 50% increase in cook times on a key item like burgers can be the difference between getting a third turn at lunch and having a second turn just sort of fade out.

When you are looking at lunch sales for weeks or months at a time, and you can’t understand why on certain days your sales dip; what else do you look at today?  If you track operations data, you can merge your sales data with other data to try and uncover what may be the cause.

We had a client that determined that on Wednesday’s they always had a dip in sales, they served a ton of burgers at this bar, and they got their food deliveries on Tuesdays.  A lot of the time they coasted into Wednesday lunch with 1/2 their burger par for the shift still frozen which killed their ticket times and their 3rd turn.  It wasn’t until they merged their checklists with their sales and looked at them by days of the week that this reality showed up.

The amazing thing was how easy it was to fix.  They worked with their suppliers to increase the number of thawed burger cases they received and instructed their cooks to ensure that they had enough frozen patties thawing to cover Wednesday dinner and Thursday.  They got their sales on Wednesdays to match or exceed their Tuesday sales, and it didn’t cost them anything but a few minutes of looking at their Ops Data.

Conclusions

Using digital checklists to track your operations data can provide context for your sales numbers.  Remeber, Operations Drive Sales – Sales don’t drive Operations.  Plus well-written checklists guide your managers to look at the most important items of your operations every day.  Digital checklists aren’t going to solve the world’s problems but they are going to help you run better operations.  If you would like to learn more about our SMART Inspection philosophy and what kinds of questions you should be asking you should sign up for our weekly webinar here.

250X250 LI

Tommy Yionoulis

I've been in the restaurant industry for most of my adult life. I have a BSBA from University of Denver Hotel Restaurant school and an MBA from the same. When I wasn't working in restaurants I was either doing stand-up comedy, for 10 years, or large enterprise software consulting. I'm currently the Managing Director of OpsAnalitica and our Inspector platform was originally conceived when I worked for one of the largest sandwich franchisors in the country. You can reach out to me through LinkedIn.

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