Posted by Walker Thompson on Fri, Sep 03, 2010 @ 04:24 PM
Sometimes funny, but mostly about what makes the retail and restaurant industry tick, each Friday the WhenToManage team plays on our company name with a WhenTo(DO). This week's WhenTo(DO) is on the mobile front, or when should your restaurant go mobile? According to the technology website cnet.com, in the first quarter of 2010 over 314.7 million mobile phones were sold, a 17 percent increase year over year. Clearly, mobile is on the rise and now you're thinking: what does it mean to my business and how do I "use" it??? Good question, but one that doesn't have an end-all-be-all answer. The smartphone and mobile space is clearly evolving. Not to mention, all the "pads" that will soon launch. So the answer is stay on top of the trends! As committed and former restaurant executives, managers, cooks and servers, we also have some ideas on how mobile can help, and our software does just that, help...
- Communication
- Using our report creator, you can "subscribe" to any report you create. Once the report is created using our web-based excel-esque interface, sending to your managers or peers is easy. The data goes right to their iPhone or Droid and the data is now at their finger tips.
- Workflow
- Hundreds of restaurants use our report creator, and mention often how much they appreciate the SMS (text-messaging) functionality. Once a schedule is published, the employee is notified of the job and schedule of that job.
- Engagement
- Keeping every constituent engaged in operations is easy using our "alerts" functionality. If you're especially concerned about tip adjustments or cash over/short then why not have a mobility offering to KNOW NOW!
We care about how restaurant employees, managers and executives spend their day and mobile is part of it. But again, stay on top of all the trends by following these authors:
Posted by Walker Thompson on Wed, Aug 25, 2010 @ 05:16 PM
We don't know what we don't know? Wonder what that actually means? Ask someone on the street as we did and you'll get several answers:
- Kevin, restaurant owner: it means you don't know where the "whats" are, as in "what if"
- John, college student: it means you can't know, because you don't know
- Travis, electrician: reminds me of working on historical buildings where I seem to never know what to know
In our minds, it means you don't know about the upcoming, upcoming. You were not as prepared as you could've been; or, not for that one little "thing". Likely, impossible to understand, report, gather intelligence on everything in advance, but what you know now often helps you to know then.
That's why doctors recommend a yearly check up, so they can help you know more about your health. Car lube/oil change establishments, make sure you're on a schedule so they can know your car. In the restaurant and retail industry, we must do the same: know more, by knowing often. The question is what should we monitor; so we, um, know at all.
To start, it is all about accurate and quality financial (labor and inventory) data. As restaurant operators, we MUST do two things well: get food in, and get it out. So the most important aspects of our business must be monitored closely. Below are few reporting and accounting best practices from RestaurantOwner.com, a great resource by the way.
- Daily recording of sales and receipts
- Detailed cost-recording of purchase invoices
- Weekly food and labor cost reporting
- Counting and computing inventory on a weekly (or monthly) basis
- Tracking key inventory item usage on a daily (or weekly) basis
- Managing time and attendance and accounting for labor expenses
- Having a monthly financial profit and loss statement
- And more... But we can help you there...
Interestingly, of this list there are three that really drove success to operators.
- Monthly financial profit and loss statement...
- 73% of operators that received monthly financial statements reported being profitable.
- Only 49% of (resturant survey) respondents that received just quarterly or annual statements were profitable.
- Weekly food and labor cost reporting...
- 75% of operators that received weekly food and labor costs were profitable.
- Only 60% of respondents that didn't get weekly reports were profitable.
- Counting and computing inventory on a weekly or monthly basis...
- 72% of operators that do an inventory at least monthly were profitable.
- Only 58% of operators that don't compute inventory values are profitable.
The bottom line is limiting, through the use of great data, that ever-present phrase, post disaster, or: we didn't know what we didn't know...
Posted by Jeff Schacher on Sat, Jul 24, 2010 @ 08:55 AM
WhenToManage uncovers communication trend: web-based scheduling application fosters increased collaboration and productivity in the restaurant industry
WhenToManage, the leader in real-time, online reporting and integrated point of sale (POS) business analytics solutions for retailers and restaurants, released the results of a nation-wide user survey proving the critical value of online labor scheduling. Operators, faced with multiple employee scheduling demands, using the web-based communications and scheduling technology, can now more effectively optimize employee-to-management information sharing through a fundamental improvement to the labor scheduling process. The 2010 Survey of WhenToManage Online Employee Scheduling Users, a national web-based survey of over 700 online restaurant employees conducted throughout June and July, found that 90% experienced improved communications to the point where they would highly recommend the application to employers. Over 70% of respondents stated the seamless communications, enabled by the application, increased productivity through improved workforce collaboration. The survey findings highlight new thinking about personnel management in the restaurant and retail industry. The data posits that increasing employee engagement through seamless and interactive scheduling technology makes for more productive employees and efficient scheduling procedures. “We were very pleased at the overall survey results. The fact that 90% of employees would recommend WhenToManage to future employers says volumes about our tools. Many of them commented saying that it ‘totally opened up communication,’” said Jeff Schacher, CEO of WhenToManage. “We discovered that many of our employee users ended up being the power-users of our technology. They are one of the driving forces behind adoption at their restaurant. Frankly, because WhenToManage is so easy to use, we believe it will reduce the headache of employee management now and in the future. Some personnel matters will go away leaving more time for essential management duties resulting in happier employees to boot!” said Schacher. Employees using the application can review their schedules and manage availability requests from either the internet, email or mobile text messages. Using secure log in functionality, employees interact with the system by requesting days off, set preferred shifts, update availability and swap shifts with other employees. Employee requests are then sent back to the store manager for approval. “With employees having less time to accomplish more, the online scheduling application addresses key productivity challenges by opening up communications and encourages employees to work together. This key development keeps the entire operation running smoothly.” Said Schacher.
Posted by Jeff Schacher on Thu, Mar 05, 2009 @ 12:14 PM
What is business intelligence anyway? According to wikipedia:
Business intelligence (
BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business
acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business
intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself.
BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of
business operations. Common functions of business intelligence
applications are reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarks, and predictive analysis.
Business intelligence often aims to support better business
decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support
system (DSS).
You may have read about BI tools and are maybe even using some.
Typically, business intelligence software has been looked at as
something for a large enterprise. Big company = lots of stores = lots
of data, and so they invest lots of money in a software system to
crunch all of their data to tell them things like their burgers can be
priced higher or that they are wasting labor dollars due to inefficient
scheduling or where in the country to open the next 10 stores.
I am here to tell you that things have changed.
- It's Easier - with the growth of the Internet,
it's much easier to move your POS data from each store to a centralized
place for processing.
- It's Cheaper - the Internet has also allowed
web-based companies to build less expensive infrastructures and methods
for collecting and processing the data. They require no large up front
investment and you just pay as you go.
- Size Doesn't Matter - now that business
intelligence tools are easier and cheaper, there's a high return on
investment for independent restaurant owners to load up their sales
data and finally get some assistance with business decisions.
As an example, the company I'm affiliated with offers a product that
fetches your POS data and gives you multiple reporting tools for
analysis of your data for less than $3 a day and there are other great
BI tools out there as well.
Even a well-designed spreadsheet
can do the job, but the point is that your restaurant generates a large
amount of very useful data. This data can tell you about the past and
just as importantly tell you about the future.
As the old saying goes, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it," and in a recession, you'd better be measuring.
Posted by Jeff Schacher on Fri, Jan 09, 2009 @ 05:37 PM
These
days there are several vendors offering web-based solutions for
restaurants. The more units a restaurant has, the more benefit to
using an online solution. In my next post, I will dive into the details
regarding all the benefits to using software as a service (SaaS), but
first let's take a look at what is out there.
- Labor Scheduling - this is the first place for any
restaurant to start. Let's face it, you're online and your employees
are online. With online scheduling, everyone can get their schedules
via the web, email, or cell phone. They can make requests, trade
shifts, and just basically communicate with the staff. At WhenToManage, this was our first product that we launched. HotSchedules is another company that offers a solution.
- Inventory Management - one great thing about
web-based inventory is that more and more suppliers are offering online
ordering, so it only makes sense to allow these systems to talk to each
other. For a restaurant company with more than one unit, an online
solution allows them to manage their recipes from a central location as
well as manage the entire supply chain from any laptop in the world. WhenToManage offers online inventory, if anyone knows of another web-based solution out there, please let me know.
- Reporting - getting the numbers from a single
location is one thing, but when you start multiplying it by 5, 10, or
50, you really need a system to pull everything together from your POS
systems, inventory systems, payroll systems, etc. Just imagine
automatically getting an email on your Blackberry every morning at 7am
with all your sales data from all your stores for the previous day. WhenToManage offers this as does a company called Guest Metrics.
- Marketing - this should actually be #1, but I
thought it was too obvious. Unfortunately, it's probably not obvious
enough for a lot of companies out there. There is not an easier or
cheaper way to reach your customers than email. At the very least, you
should have a customer database and send them an occasional email about
your latest and greatest promotion. From there, you can upgrade to a
loyalty program and stored value cards. There are lots of great companies that offer these services. Fishbowl and Stored Value Solutions are two that come to mind, but there are many others.
- POS (Point-of Sale) - POS
systems are the core of any restaurant operation, and a web-based POS
solution may strike fear into your heart, but rest assured, there are
some amazing products out there and they all have systems to secure
your data and keep everything working when the Internet goes down. How
great would it be to update a price a) from home b) for 20 stores at
the touch of a button? How great would it be to open the store in the
morning with the latest POS upgrade that installed itself before you
got in (and did I mention that your other 20 stores were also
automatically upgraded at the same time)? NetPOS offers a fantastic solution that I know quite well, and Halo also offers a web-based POS.
Hopefully, this will get you thinking about making the next step in the evolution of your restaurant.