Intelligent Checklists: What are they and why you should care

Basically, when you can’t intelligently customize your checklist to your locations, you pay more money for worse execution and mediocre data.

Before you dismiss this as just pennies of cost. The average restaurant management team is supposed to be completing about 2 to 2.5 hours of managerial, food safety, and restaurant readiness checklists per day.

Think about it, you have two line checks that take 45 minutes each to complete, that is 90 minutes right there. Most of our clients have between 5 and 15 shorter checklists that get executed throughout the day. Examples of common checklists that our clients are using: Manager opening and closing, HACCP Logs, Shift Logs, Line Checks, Mid-shifts, Deposit Logs, Station opening and closing, prep lists, cooling logs, oven checks, equipment checks, temperature logs, etc..

At two hours a day, 363 days a year, that is the equivalent of 18 (40 hour) weeks a year your team is spending doing checklists. Quick math that is about 36% of full time employees year spent doing checklists. Making sure the checklists can be completed quickly, accurately, and that you achieve your business goals of running safe and inviting restaurants is paramount to your business.

Checklists are the most important administrative activity in your restaurant because they are the driver of food safety, operations consistency, and customer satisfaction.

Now let’s talk about the wasted money at Corporate because of checklist systems that can’t dynamically create checklists and audits for their locations. We are working with a client and their system administrator was spending 20 hours a week managing their audits and daily checklists on one of our competitors software before coming to OpsAnalitica. This 20 hours was in addition to their other responsibilities.

They had to have several versions of every checklist in the system. They had to have, in some cases, hundreds of redundant questions to account for deficiencies in our competitors platform. All this added up to a ton of extra time trying to conform their business to their checklist program vs. having checklist software that worked with their business.

20 hours a week of admin time, that is insane. The worse part was, they didn’t always make the changes they wanted to because the software was hard to administrate. They missed out on opportunities to get better data, to make better operating decisions, because their software wasn’t up to the task.

Why is OpsAnalitica able to create intelligent checklists when our competitors can’t. First, we were built from day one to be a daily checklist platform when most of our competitors started off as audit platforms. We knew that daily checklists did more to drive behavior change at the restaurant level then audits did and that was learned from years of restaurant management experience from the store to the corporate level. Daily checklists are harder to build and require more nuance than a one size fits all audit solution.

  • The OpsLogic Engine, is our secret sauce. It allows us to create the logic that drives intelligent checklist creation. I’m not going to get into more detail here other than to say that we have the most advanced logic engine in the space today, we are making huge investments to make it more powerful and it going to change how you run your business.

One last point about our OpsLogic engine, it goes beyond just yes no questions. We are writing logic that ensures your food safety and quality goals are met. Take cheese sauce as an example: sure it needs to be warmer than 135 but it needs to be less than 165 or it breaks and you have to throw it away. This increases food cost and is equivalent to throwing money in the garbage.

An Intelligent OpsAnalitica checklist is going to flag that question in real-time and provide the employee with directions, “Cheese sauce too warm, in danger of breaking, reduce temp immediately, take photo to document”. By the way that corrective action is required.

One of the phrases we use a lot over here at OpsAnalitica is “We take the guesswork out of running the restaurants.” This has never been more true with our Intelligent Checklist creation and OpsLogic engine. To learn more about what we can do to help you run your business and to get a pricing quote, please fill out this form.

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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