The time has come. Your service or retail business – be it a restaurant or retail, grocery or convenience store — is ready to expand beyond a single location, or a small handful of locations. This is an exciting time, but a truly daunting one. How can you make sure all the operational and customer-oriented procedures that made your original location a success are carried over and built directly into the DNA of all your subsequent locations? With a field audit app that ensures operational standards are consistently being met.
Building this kind of operational consistency means standardizing retail items or services available in each location, stabilizing the supply chain that feeds each location, following the same employment practices and policies, and holding management to the same standards within each location. When issues arise, the process for reporting and improving them must also be consistent.
You have several broad avenues that must be covered as thoroughly as if you were there yourself – just like you were for the first location:
- Employee onboarding
- Daily operational checklist completion
- Standardizing audits and action plans
Let’s talk about the next-generation tool – fully digital and mobile, that operates in real time – that can help you cover all these requirements for every employee and every location throughout your enterprise.
Onboarding
With appropriate hiring, training and reinforcement, your employees become the magicians behind the success of each location and your whole enterprise. A digital application like MeazureUp makes it easy to standardize your training into one online location and then designate specific training modules and requirements for each set of job responsibilities. Your training establishes exactly what actions to take and how employees should act within each location. Each employee gets clear, established, standardized onboarding that is still customized to be relevant to their position. This helps ensure that, while your customers interact with different employees at different locations, those employees are all behaving in a consistent manner and supporting an excellent customer experience.
Using an online and mobile training program means that whenever training updates are needed, updates and additions are made just once – and the app pushes out all the latest information to every employee in every location at the same time.
Daily Operations
Once your employees are fully on board, you need to see exactly what actions they’re taking throughout each shift. Every interaction your employees have with customers in any location should clearly demonstrate your company values as well as compliance with all regulations and operational standards.
Thanks to the readily available inventory of tablets and smartphones, a digital and mobile checklist app like MeazureUp lets employees complete standardized checklists with just a few taps and clicks. They can even quickly and easily add photos and videos to the official records.
As each checklist is completed, the entries are time-stamped, geolocated, and automatically added to a centralized app dashboard that displays all results across multiple locations in real time. Anyone in your organization can pull up the status of any list at any location at any time. This establishes not only the consistency you need throughout your organization, but also leads to enforcing accountability.
Audits and Action Plans
While digital checklists are an important part of daily operations, your expanding organization still needs an auditing system that stakeholders can understand and implement.
A digital auditing application like MeazureUp will house a standardized, consistent audit schedule customized to your organization. This automates all your routine assessments, from food safety to public health and compliance to branding. With a few taps and clicks, your auditors can quickly and easily document whether each location is complying with the procedures that ensure safety, consistency and customer satisfaction.
There are other ways a digital field audit tool saves time. Your district managers no longer have to spend time documenting their observations through handwritten notes, only to transcribe them into an Excel file later. No matter where your DM physically is, they are guaranteed to have the exact audit that management wants, saving time that previously was spent going back and forth between the head office and various locations to align on the correct questions. Once any assessment is complete, the dashboard automatically updates and the summary report is automatically emailed out to all relevant stakeholders.
Should the audit uncover any issues to be addressed, action plan templates make it easy to autofill all the details, assign actions to the relevant employees, establish deadlines, and provide for oversight of plan completion. All of this is again handled quickly and efficiently, often while the auditor is still in the location. Once the plan is saved, all of its details are available throughout your network in real time. When operational or food safety requirements change, managers can update the audit forms and push them out to the field instantly.
Field Audit Tool Brings Data Analytics for All
Now here’s an exclusive benefit of a mobile, digital field audit system that can make or break your expansion efforts: MeazureUp includes easy-to-use, built-in analytics that collect all the operational details and consolidate them into clear, real-time reporting. These reports are key to driving performance improvement and better decision-making; you don’t have to rely on anecdotal evidence or gut instinct to make decisions about any one location – or all of them. You can quickly uncover any problems at any location, or identify best practices from any location and roll them out across the organization. The data can also help you spot previously unrealized opportunities.
Make Expansion Easier with MeazureUp
When expanding into multiple locations, speed and consistency are key to every aspect of the business. MeazureUp is a powerful field audit app that can yield extraordinary results in terms of brand consistency, operational success, and saving both time and money. And because it works from any smart device in real time, it’s like you are truly at every location, every day. This is why so many of our partners list location expansion as their primary motivation for joining our team.
To learn how to scale and expand your stores quickly while ensuring consistency and accountability, visit meazureup.com.
