The OpsAnalitica Way – The Secret to Running Better Multi-unit Operations

Introduction

OpsAnalitica is a restaurant Ops Excellence platform that makes it easier to manage multi-unit restaurant organizations. With the OpsAnalitica platform you are able to script out the perfect shift from a guest readiness, food quality and safety perspective.  Most importantly, you are able to hold your teams accountable to executing your plan.

We know that when restaurant teams focus on the basics of: cleanliness, readiness, food taste, and food safety, they run better restaurants.  Customers get what they expect and are more satisfied, which equals increased sales and profits.

What does OpsAnalitica do that is different than what we are already doing?

Accountability; shift level accountability has always been missing from multi-unit restaurant organizations because there was no easy way to be everywhere at once. In the past we were forced to create tons of training and spend countless hours and dollars getting that training into the locations only to have it be ignored when the restaurant teams weren’t being directly observered.

We solve this age old problem by giving upper management real-time visibility into operations and a way to hold their teams accountable after the fact. This control allows management to oversee their restaurants while simultaneously being able to focus on growing their business.  This is truly revolutionary because in the past you couldn’t do both.

Read our case study to learn more about the 4000% monthly return one of our clients is getting.

Running great multi-unit restaurant operations is all about upper management focus. Where your focus is directed is what is going to get done. If you are focused and setting all of your expectations on running great operations, then that is what is going to happen. If you are focused on adding new restaurants, then that is what is going to happen.

With OpsAnalitica we become your consistent daily focus on running great operations, and we allow you to manage that in real-time remotely so you can also focus on growing your business.

This blog is going to explain our entire multi-unit restaurant management system and how it works. It assumes that you are going to use OpsAnalitica or another daily checklist software to accomplish your goals because attempting to do this without the visibility and accountability that software can provide is impossible.

Definitions

• Centrally Managed Daily Checklist Program is a daily checklist program that is being centrally managed by the operations team.
  • The checklists are consistently being updated to reflect current operations priorities such as special events or operations focus.
  • These checklists are core to the successful daily operations of the restaurants from a safety and guest readiness perspective. They are the backbone of your operations procedures and are expected to be completed on-time every shift.
  • Checklist Compliance should be a major part of your quarterly bonus structure and bonuses should be reduced if compliance doesn’t meet expectations.
  • Common daily checklists: Mgr Opening/Closing, Temp Logs, Line Checks, Shift Change, Shift Logs, and daily cleaning tasks.
• Site Visits: Site visits are quick critical checks that are conducted anytime someone who doesn’t work directly at the restaurant visits the restaurant.
  • These site visits should take less than 10 minutes to complete. You want them done every time so don’t make them too long.
  • They should consist of only the most critical FOH/BOH items.
  • FOH: Bathrooms, Cleanliness, Trash, Entry Way, Counter
  • BOH: Sanitizer Buckets, Walk-in, Hand sink, Storage, Food Safety
  • 5 or so questions FOH/BOH criticals to ensure that the restaurant is safe and inviting for guests.
  • Site visits are flexible and can be changed to reflect current ops focus.
• Audits:
  • Audits are your big thorough scorecard; they are conducted between 1 and 12 times a year. Audits take 1 to 8 hours to complete, and they look at everything from the FOH/BOH.
  • Every restaurant gets the same audit so you can are comparing apples to apples.
  • Audits are how you identify larger operational trends across your restaurants.
  • Audits are an important part of scoring the operations of your restaurant chain.
  • The problem with audits is that some chains only use audits and the don’t track site visits or daily checklists, that is bad.

Here is how the OpsAnalitica Way works.

1. Audit:
   1. Conduct store audits on every restaurant in the chain on your schedule.
   2. To learn more about setting up a World Class Audit System check out our blog.
2. Analyze:
   1. Review the results and identify operational issues that you want to address.
   2. In the OpsAnalitica Platform, we have a report that will show you exactly where your individual issues are so you can put together your plan to fix them.
   3. Don’t just fall into the trap of its a training issue and start retraining everyone every time.  If you can ask employees how to do something correctly and they can answer the question, then they don’t need to be retrained.  Take some time and try to figure out why it isn’t getting done correctly. It could be an operations issue that needs some rethinking.
   4. Make a plan on how to fix the issue.
3. Update Daily Checklists:
   1. This is where the idea of centrally managed checklists come from. You have identified your issue; you have a plan to solve it.
   2. Update your checklists to address the issue.  Checklists are your behavior change mechanism.  When you change the checklist you change the behavior of the managers in the restaurants.
   3. This is why a centrally managed checklist program is so key to the success of running multi-unit restaurants because you can orchestrate the daily activities of everyone from corporate and measure the results.
   4. This is also why you have to use a restaurant checklist platform, OpsAnalitica, to run the restaurants.  The Platform is what drives the accountability, data collection, and is what makes this whole system possible.
4. Store Visits:
   1. Since most restaurant chains the only audit at most one time per quarter but field team members should constantly be in the restaurants the site visit is a perfect vehicle to measure how well the restaurants are pulling through initiatives.
   2. Ad 1 question to the site visit that will best capture the success or failure of your new ops initiative.
5. Rinse and Repeat:
   1. This is a continuous improvement process. You are never done auditing, evaluating, and updating your procedures.

What we have created is a feedback loop that uses real-world data to help Operations teams to run better operations across multiple locations. When you do this right, you are building a culture of excellence, and you will be able to slowly and methodically raise and maintain your operations levels across all of your units by slowly cranking down on your own issues and addressing them promptly.

This is how using OpsAnalitica will help you run safer, more profitable, and better restaurants fulfilling your brand promise to your customers and helping you exceed your business goals.

If you want to learn more about the OpsAnalitica platform, click here to learn more about our free trial.