What can we say about the restaurant industry in 2020 that hasn’t been said elsewhere? As a restaurant district manager, you’re already living it. We do, however, want to point out something that could absolutely make your life easier at this time and could help you make great strides toward ensuring the success of your locations at a time when there are no guarantees – A digital field audit app.
Thanks to COVID-19, many of your procedures and training policies were thrown into uncertainty, and maybe they haven’t landed yet. Maybe they have, but you’re not sure how effective or successful they are. You’re probably also trying to integrate new business models like curbside delivery, home delivery and more takeout business than has ever been seen before.
If you’ve been trying to audit all this on paper for the past few months, it is past time to implement a digital field audit solution. Here’s why.
Why Now?
Let’s start with the changes brought on by the pandemic. It has never been more important for every single one of your employees to understand and implement the latest public health and sanitation guidelines, such as:
- Completing daily health checks for all on-site employees
- Renewed focus on ensuring all hand sinks have warm water, soap and paper towels readily available
- A related increase in the frequency of checking hand sinks, including those in the guest restrooms
- Proper storage and use of EPA-approved disinfectants
A digital restaurant kitchen checklist makes it quick and easy for your employees, auditors and management to complete updated evaluations and inspections as needed, with the results available online at any time.
There are other important benefits, too. Now, more than ever, you’re doing location drop-ins and routine field assessments in an effort to ensure safety and profitability. If you spend most of your time in the field, completing these assessments quickly and efficiently opens up more time for other important on-site activities like training and mentoring staff members and communicating with franchisees.
If, in addition, you also had all the results of all your audits from every location online, as soon as they’re completed, you would gain another benefit: The ability to analyze each store’s performance while you’re still standing in it. This real-time trend data could tell you how each store is doing in comparison with others and could help diagnose any problems so you can immediately begin addressing them with all the relevant employees. Clear action plans can be developed and assigned for implementation while you’re still on site.
Why Not Paper?
You may have noticed it’s impossible to get these benefits from manual audits with clipboards on site and spreadsheets back at the main office. These traditional methods are time-consuming to the point of being counterproductive, both for the auditor and for those monitoring operations across locations.
Assuming the data is eventually entered into spreadsheets without human error or errors in the spreadsheet formulas themselves, the process takes hours, if not days. Further, you likely have different auditors conducting individual assessments in different locations – maintaining different versions of the same spreadsheets, each with unique and comprehensive scoring, notes and action plans. By the time data is consolidated to provide a full operational picture, some data has become irrelevant or outdated – and you have no way of knowing which data that is.
In other words, it’s hard enough to identify core operational issues across your locations without introducing time delays, errors and incomplete data into your reporting. You need detailed data that focuses on core values in order to maintain the consistency across locations that your customers demand, particularly in our current reality of razor-thin profit margins.
Why a Digital Field Audit Solution?
With field audit software, audits can be completed quickly on site while still increasing the accuracy and validity of the information gathered. Performing an audit is as easy as opening up the field audit app on any smart device and starting to tap. Notes are added directly during the audit, without any need to transcribe from handwritten notes or store them separately. Photos and videos can also be added with point-and-shoot ease. The audit is submitted digitally and the system is updated in real time.
Also, because less time is required on the logistics side of each assessment, you and your audit team can complete more assessments – which means identifying operational trends in much less time so you can reduce costs and increase operational consistency. These advantages have made field audit software indispensable for chains that want to stay competitive.
Just as important, any audit is available throughout your network as soon as one clicks “submit.” Automated scoring in real time provides a more detailed picture of the complete data, not just for that one location, but across multiple locations, all audits, and all operational components in order to see which are consistently failing or succeeding. This helps you spot trends as they emerge and supports the corrective and preventive measures that help you achieve both full compliance with brand standards and operational excellence.
All the Reasons You Need
More time for other responsibilities, more effectiveness in the field, fewer errors, and full data available all the time, from anywhere, so you can make better decisions in the instant when you can affect the most positive change. The question really is, why haven’t you contacted MeazureUp before now?
MeazureUp’s auditing app is a one-stop solution where each report from each location is aggregated in real time into a single unified location on a cloud-based platform, making it easy to analyze the data and spot trends to help identify core operational issues. It presents error-free, actionable data to help ensure each location’s success as well as the whole chain’s. And not only does it vastly streamline your auditing procedures; in these chaotic times, it also allows you to update policies and procedures just once and push out the latest information to every employee via their mobile phone or tablet with all records updated instantly.
Everyone in your network connected and provided with complete audits and the latest information, from anywhere. Is this a level of service you yourself could use in 2020? Contact us today to find out.
