Restaurant operators are always looking for ways to elevate their restaurant teams to achieve not just operations execution but operational excellence (ops excellence). Ops excellence is consistently high-quality guest experiences coupled with profitable operations, and it is made up of many parts, one being operations execution. Ops excellence can help cement a brand as a household name, but without the right tools, it can be tricky or costly.
As planning meetings begin for 2024, make sure your restaurant leadership team is prioritizing investments in operations execution to assist in achieving ops excellence. Finding ways to improve team execution or to guarantee high-quality service doesn’t just benefit the customer, but it can also have a profound impact on the employee experience and profitability of the restaurant.
Despite the benefits, it can be difficult to get operational investments approved internally due to not knowing the exact ways that brands can expect a return on investment. In order to help advocate for initiative approval for operations execution tools, it is important to evaluate current metrics to understand how improved operations can benefit the business.
Productivity
With the many individual tasks that get performed in restaurants each day, every increase in productivity can have a significant impact. Time savings from increased productivity for rote (yet required) tasks can mean that team members’ time can be reallocated to activities that provide more value to the customers or the restaurant.
To identify potential value, track how much time team members spend on different types of tasks throughout the day or each week. For example, restaurant teams spend countless hours on food preparation and cleaning tasks each week, so an investment in a tool that could help track completion and reduce time spent on routine activities could pay for itself quickly.
Ask yourself how a reduction of 5+ hours each week could benefit your restaurant by reallocating those hours to other activities that can improve the customer experience or by eliminating those hours and reducing labor costs.
Quality
A primary benefit of operations execution tools is helping to ensure product and service quality for customers, which enables both a great guest experience as well as consistency across separate visits and locations.
To help determine the value of how improved food and service quality can impact customer satisfaction and the restaurant’s bottom line, evaluate current audit scores, health inspection results, and customer satisfaction ratings. Take time to determine where improvements can be made and use ROI statistics from the operations execution platform to determine ways its implementation could help your restaurant.
With so many competitors saturating the market, any increase in product or service quality can give your brand a competitive advantage and help make your restaurant the go-to choice. See where your brand compares to competitors regarding customer reviews on Google, Yelp, or delivery apps and how an improvement would change your standing or expand your lead.
Visibility
Having visibility into the daily operations of a restaurant is key to effective management and making informed business decisions. This is especially important as a brand grows to multiple locations, as operators can lose clarity into what is going on across locations.
In order to understand how much value it would bring to implement an operations execution tool that can aid in visibility and communication, take a look at your current operations to determine where your visibility falls short. Ask yourself how quickly (if at all) your above store operators gain access to store information like temperature logs or task list completion.
Many restaurants using outdated systems will find that upper management can only access this information if they visit the store in person or ask store managers to bring the logs into weekly meetings. This means that your leadership team won’t have the live visibility they need in order to act quickly, and it will make it more difficult to consolidate information to look for trends.
For example, with visibility into store operations, it would be easier to make a connection between morning checklists being completed late and low customer satisfaction scores for early-morning visits. With an operations execution tool designed to help identify trends, your restaurant’s ability to correct problems would be almost instantaneous, meaning that repeat issues could be eliminated.
Make the case
Advocating for investment in operations execution is easy, especially because it advocates for itself. In investment meetings, lay out the current state of your restaurant(s)’ operations in the above areas, and describe what improvements can be made with the implementation of an operations execution tool.
Point out that by increasing productivity, quality, and visibility, an investment in operations execution can reduce costs and increase customer loyalty, doubling the potential for profit increases.
Check out this article for an in-depth look at how to make the business case for operations execution, and follow along with the series to see how prioritizing Ops excellence can elevate your restaurant’s success.
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