Using paper and pencil or electronic spreadsheets for food safety audits is old school. Automated, mobile, cloud-based technology is the new ingredient for success.
By Shane Callahan
A key component of successfully establishing and preserving your restaurant’s reputation is your ability to manage the operational details. Details can be overwhelming — especially if your restaurant has multiple locations. One of the vital tools for managing your day-to-day details is the food safety audit.
A restaurant’s reputation takes years to build but — thanks to the immediacy of social media — only seconds to tarnish or destroy. If one customer becomes ill, or worse even dies, from a foodborne disease that can be traced to your restaurant, news will travel fast and your sales will plummet almost just as quickly. If your restaurant is part of a chain, rest assured the reputation damage is inflicted upon the entire chain bearing the name, not just a location.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) become ill, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases annually.
Unfortunately, a study from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Americans are twice as likely to get food poisoning from food prepared at a restaurant than from food prepared at a home.
Any flaw in a restaurant’s operational efficiency can wreck havoc upon your reputation. Making food safety audits based on the latest technology an essential function of your operations is one of the smartest steps a restaurant can take to avoid spreading foodborne illnesses.
A surprising number of restaurants still rely on outdated methods for conducting food safety audits, such as electronic spreadsheets or — even worse — paper and pencil. Such archaic methods make it difficult, if not virtually impossible, to consistently deliver a safe, high-quality product and superior customer service.
So, what are the secrets to keeping track of your operations so that you can have consistent quality and continuous improvement?
I suggest there are five things your food safety auditing tool must provide for your restaurant to optimize operational efficiency, maximize profitability, and limit the chance of a foodborne illness occurring:
1. Monitoring of your restaurant’s performance in real time.
2. Improved communications.
3. Greater accountability.
4. Building of employee expertise.
5. Creating a shared understanding of success within your team so you can immediately see and acknowledge when improvements are made.
Successfully executing these five steps requires having the right information readily available. When there’s a problem, you need to pinpoint the critical issues and take the right corrective actions to get those issues resolved quickly. That’s the only way to decrease your risk of foodborne illnesses and ensure ongoing compliance.
Monitoring of Your Restaurant’s Performance in Real Time
Having real-time, up-to-the-minute audit information allows you to master the many small things like restaurant cleanliness, customer service and regulatory compliance. That’s what ultimately drives the big things like revenues, customer satisfaction and loyalty. But, as previously mentioned, it becomes more complicated when dealing with multiple locations.
Before adopting a food safety auditing tool, Buffalo Wild Wings had little data to work with and no uniform method for gathering data to improve its restaurants. Now the franchise utilizes software technology as a service log for regional managers to capture daily, detailed observations of food service, food quality and overall restaurant experience. This information can be aggregated to identify trends and behaviors and help make important decisions regarding company policy and procedures — which drives increased accountability and consistent improvement across the franchise.
“Now we can see exactly why a location earned a specific score and use the data to make our business better,” says Bob Gremel of Buffalo Wild Wings operation excellence department. “We can see how it affects our guests and how it affects our team members.”
Improved Communications
If you’re able to give employees access to critical data in a centralized location through a closed-loop communication system, you will greatly impact operational efficiency. Restaurants need a system to configure and manage alerts, report distribution and urgent communications. Accurate, timely intelligence that’s easy to digest will facilitate the communications necessary for developing processes for remedying issues before they become crises. There must be a process for rapid, guaranteed communication with verified, directed responses.
Greater Accountability
A closed-loop communication system allows restaurants to accurately pinpoint critical business and operational issues instantly through alerts, as well as through reports that notify the appropriate individuals when processes aren’t followed. This fosters accountability because it will clearly indicate when a process has been followed or a corrective action has been implemented.
When Checkers, a fast food franchise with 805 locations, made the switch from a labor-intensive audit data collection method to software technology that automates the auditing process, accountability increased.
In 2008 Joe Ventimiglia, Checkers’ systems operations services manager, was introduced to a business performance software and was told it would make internal audits easier and increase operational efficiency. After seeing it did just that, use of the software not only expanded to all the restaurants, but also to other corporate departments besides operations.
“People have to wear a lot of hats in corporate offices. There simply isn’t time to keep track of all the data you need with paper, Excel spreadsheets or email chains back and forth. There are too many things that fall through the cracks and you waste a lot of time,” says Ventimiglia. “Now, the right person always has the right information on hand to make the right decision.”
Building of Employee Expertise
Employee expertise, and efficiency, starts with having a clear vision into what’s happening, as well as giving employees the ability to quickly spot catastrophic stoppers and immediately trigger corrective actions. Employees with the right expertise will demonstrate an understanding of which “best practices” to replicate.
Inefficiencies hurt employee expertise because employees will not have the time necessary to effectively perform all their job functions effectively. A few years ago, the Landmark Restaurant Group, an IHOP franchisee company, had a very serious auditing efficiency problem. The process Landmark’s regional managers had for conducting regular audits included printing multiple forms, filing them into a large binder, and then conducting an audit. Completing all the forms and questionnaires took 2 to 3 hours, on average. Once complete, the manager spent another 1 to 2 hours entering the data collected, notes and relevant photos from the audit, creating reports and sending them to appropriate management. It was then up to the management team to determine how to use the data to impact operations and increase same-store sales. On top of that, management needed to ensure their regional managers and operators were conducting all of their required audits, and that corrective actions were completed and resolved.
It goes without saying that this process was incredibly time consuming, yet critical to the business. Managers were becoming buried by data, as were their corporate administrative assistants. This spurred Landmark to look for a tool to simplify the auditing process. When the company changed to a paper-free audit system, it saved a lot of prep time and already had all the data it needed captured. There was no need to do manual data entry.
I can tell you several stories like this. For example, managers at Arby’s franchisee organization, Brumit Restaurant Group, also used a paper-based system. When they switched to software technology, they cut their audit time in half.
It’s surprising to me in this day and age how many businesses are still using paper, pencil and a clipboard to conduct their internal food safety audits. What typically happens is someone writes down the collected data and then files it away — sometimes never to be seen again. The problem with this method is it may “work,” but the data isn’t being utilized or even looked at. This can lead to some very serious problems. If there are corrections that need to be made immediately, it may be weeks or months before that data ends up in the decision maker’s hands so that those crucial corrections can be executed.
Creating a Shared Understanding of Success Within Your Team
Employees should be assigned roles and responsibilities that clearly outline a shared vision of success. When success is achieved, it’s immediately recognized and acknowledged.
To consistently maintain success, the best restaurants want and need to control all the moving parts of their business. This cannot be efficiently accomplished with an archaic system like paper and pencil, or even with electronic spreadsheets. The only way to effectively do that is to adopt an automated system that keeps track of those moving parts with real-time data. That way you know which parts of your company engine are running smoothly and which ones need an adjustment. The goal is to keep the whole system running with less waste and greater profitability.
With ever-increasing demand on your time, along with the need to make your restaurant as lean and competitive as possible, you can’t spend your day poring over databases and spreadsheets of information. It’s way too difficult to efficiently extract the actionable data you need to improve your operational efficiency.
Friendly’s Ice Cream previously used a third-party auditing system that was limited to data capture using Excel spreadsheets. By switching to an automated system in early 2015, Friendly’s has been able to provide a more consistent and comprehensive evaluation tool for general managers to use during internal audits. According to Friendly’s Ice Cream’s director of quality assurance, Lionel Bisson, the effect has been significant as Friendly’s is able to gather much more meaningful data in less time and distribute that data to the right people immediately.
“[The internal operations directors] commented on how much easier and more enjoyable auditing was because they could eliminate the paper and pencil routine and notify the right people automatically,” says Bisson.
The bottom line is moving from outdated methods like paper and pencil or electronic spreadsheets to automated business performance software will save your company a tremendous amount of time because it greatly simplifies the process of collecting data from all your departments.
When shopping for a business performance software, there are a number of features to look for, including:
• It should report your data in a format that’s easy to read and digest.
• It should provide real-time assessment, and be accessible anytime from your mobile device. Your general computer office suite doesn’t offer the right tools to accurately capture and analyze your data in real time, so using that software will ultimately just be a waste of your time and resources.
• Make sure it’s customizable for your requirements. You should be able to track and record the data that you need in one integrated system that automatically populates all the reports, charts and graphs that require that data.
• You should have control over when and how you see your reports and data, and have the ability to set alerts to automatically signal you with when threshold levels were met or were not met, depending on what you’re tracking.
• Collaboration is key in business performance management software. All the stakeholders should have the details as well as the big picture view of the entire company process. This will allow them to work collaboratively, share information, and even send messages through the system to those with authorized access to the software.
• Finally, the software must allow you to put an action plan in place to correct performance issues. It should not only help you track the changes, but also the completion of the action plan. By enabling constant improvements to operations and quality, you’ll be well on your way to maximizing your operational efficiency.
In this day and age, it makes sense to replace outdated data collecting methods with mobile and cloud-based tools during internal audits. Restaurants need to do all they can to maintain operational efficiency so they can stay competitive and profitable… and keep customers safe.
— Shane Callahan is vice president of operations for Steton Technology Group. He has over 12 years of financial and operations management experience. For more information, visit www.steton.com.