标签存档： customerexperience

IS YOUR RESTAURANT’S PIE OF REPAIR COSTS INCREASING DAY BY DAY?

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Any business has to incur a mix of fixed and variable expenses. If you are running a restaurant business, you will have expenses like salaries and rent that you incur irrespective of the number of open days and customers’ footfall. Expenses on food item purchases, however, would vary on the scale of business. 

 

When it comes to repairs and maintenance, a certain amount of it is expected in any business. Items like your kitchen equipment and air-conditioning will go through regular wear and tear. However, when these expenses occur too frequently, you need to sit up and take notice.

You look into the expense trend, sift out the avoidable ones from the unavoidable ones, and look for ways to avoid them to the extent possible. Here is a coordinated approach that you can adopt to keep your restaurant repair cost within the tolerable limit:

BUDGET AND ANALYSIS

Excessive costs erode a business’s profitability, sometimes to an alarming degree. It is always worthwhile to update budget figures and take stock of the restaurant’s various expenses. Depending on the equipment’s age, warranties available, number of items that need repair, etc. an estimate of the repair costs can be made. A detailed list of all these items should be in place, along with the maintenance requirement against each of them. Some of these items would be under warranty; some covered under maintenance contracts while the rest would need one-time repairs. After that, a regular analysis of the expenses incurred and noticing deviations between budgeted and actual costs ensure prompt identification of unexpected expenses. The expertise of service providers like Pulse comes handy in such workflow management and helps increase the business’s profitability.

MAINTENANCE CONTRACTS

Repairs in a restaurant may be required for kitchen equipment, refrigeration, plumbing, and heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) equipment. By entering into maintenance contracts for these items, you can successfully reduce your long-term operating costs. Inking annual maintenance contracts puts various scheduled maintenance in place, which prevents breakdowns and subsequent losses. These contracts help you avoid large expenses that you would otherwise have to incur. In order to manage these contracts, you can use Pulse’s “Track and Assign Actions” feature.

INDUSTRY STANDARDS

As a thumb rule, repairs of 1-3% of the overall budget is considered tolerable. However, depending on your location and industry, you should find out how your peers are doing for repair costs. This acts as a useful benchmark in understanding and budgeting your restaurant expenses. Probing into industry standards will also enlighten you about the restaurant’s best practices that can further streamline your day-to-day operations.

STAFF AWARENESS

It is not practical to remind employees of rising expenses without doing your homework. But with an updated budget in your hand, maintenance contracts in place, and knowledge of the industry, you are better equipped. The next step would be to sensitize your staff about the various practices that can reduce the need for repair. It could be by encouraging simple daily practices like avoiding unnecessary use of equipment, following standard operating procedures (SOP) while using them, and educating them about early warning signs of malfunctioning equipment. Notably, Pulse provides checklist-based inspection processes that can be customized and put in place in your restaurant operations.

OPTIMIZING LAYOUT

In a customer-facing service like a restaurant, the layout is important for various reasons. An attractive layout can woo more customers, improve the ambiance, simplify operations, and minimize expenses. Smart layouts can minimize air-conditioning, reduce the preparation time in the kitchen, and even reduce breakages. A congested layout, on the other hand, generally leads to more cutlery breakages, while a haphazard seating arrangement can increase the consumption of utilities and their wear and tear. Similarly, improving the kitchen set up can reduce the pressure on equipment and the workforce and improve efficiency.

CONCLUSION

With a focused approach towards your restaurant’s repair costs, you can keep better control over your restaurant expenses. And by adopting standardized processes and regularly monitoring and auditing the spending patterns, you can be better prepared to meet your restaurant’s repair and maintenance needs.

The BARE-IFY Audit App is an advanced safety compliance and auditing tool is an audit and inspection platform with robust incident reporting mechanisms and super user-centric UI. By making your company’s incident reporting process more straightforward, you’ll reduce the time your employees spend in reporting incidents and automatically cut back on opportunistic mistakes.

Pulse also offers ready-to-use checklists for multiple industries so that you can stay on the top of your compliance game and reduce the chances of incidents.

THE NOT SO HIDDEN COSTS OF IGNORING QUALITY CONTROL

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All organizations, irrespective of their industry, have a vision. This vision is often fueled by the organizations’ financial position. An effective quality control system ensures  that a company’s financial position is strong and helps it ascend the trajectory of success. This also assists businesses ensure customer satisfaction, build a strong brand image, and improve their processes.

 

If a business is content with its financial position, and is least bothered whether its product will be viable 50 years down the line, then the quality management system in this scenario is redundant. It is rendered useless if the organization does not have an aim to leave a legacy behind, or to create a long-lasting brand.

However, in the scenario where an organization aims to grow its market share, and create an impression on its customers as well as investors, then a quality management system becomes a vital tool in its arsenal. Experts advise that once you are aware of the quality management system, do not spend a day without it. Take advantage of this system to be a step ahead of your competition.

An effective system of quality management has 8 important principles:

  1. Strong leadership
  2. Customer focus
  3. Process approach
  4. Involvement of people
  5. Continuous improvement
  6. System approach
  7. Creating value for suppliers, clients, and the company
  8. Decision-making based on actionable insights

In the absence of a formal quality management system, a majority of the organizations lack most of these key principles or elements. Unless these 8 principles are employed in unison, organizations will not be able to realize the entire benefits of the quality management system. Employing a few of these principles, and ignoring the rest will not assist an organization bring about efficiency in its processes.

RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH IGNORANCE OF QUALITY CONTROL

Here are a few examples of partial engagement of the quality management process, and the risks faced by organizations:

  • The absence of a continuous improvement system hinders the growth of a product, and causes it to lag behind its competitors who continue to improve and enhance the functionality, and quality of their products. An effective quality management system identifies deficiencies in a product, and, at the same time, ensures that the products delivered to customers are defect-free. A continuous improvement system can alleviate the manufacturing costs of an organization by reducing the number of defective products. It can also assist in increasing the production via refinement and continuous analysis of the manufacturing process.
  • The absence of a customer satisfaction system will encourage customers to look out for other options, and organizations which value their needs and requirements. An effective quality management system needs to have a continuously improving customer satisfaction program at its core. An organization that does not value customer satisfaction is liable to lose customers to its competitors who respond positively to the demands of customers.

In today’s hyper-competitive world, the  products that will win the hearts of consumers will be the ones that continuously improve their quality. Such products will continue to garner a larger audience, thus reducing the market share of its competitors.

  • The absence of a document control and management program will hinder the growth of an organization, as it will lack a formal point of initiation. An effective quality management system lays down the requirements of periodic review, approval, and development of procedures that govern the organization’s operations and processes. In the absence of detailed documentation, the workforce has to operate as it deems fit, with a not recognized method of product control, and no accountability.

Employees who leave the organization after working for long terms take vital information with them, which leaves other employees clueless, and the business in jeopardy. Without documentation, it becomes impossible to pinpoint the cause of defects in the processes, thus making it highly difficult to employ corrective actions. This incurs the company extra costs, as they may  have to scrap the entire process anytime.

CONCLUSION

An organization can be affected adversely in the absence of a formal quality management system. It can also prevent a business from attaining new contracts, and collaborating with top-tier companies. An effective quality management system requires the suppliers of a certain business to have a defined quality control system of their own. When companies adhere to the guideline mentioned in the quality management system, they expect their suppliers to comply with the same.

HOW MUCH CAN DELAYED INCIDENT REPORTING COST YOU?

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Delayed incident reporting is an unfortunate but common problem in business management. Every company requires a reporting system to help track relevant incidents and take prompt actions. And that’s where incident management comes into the picture. It plays a critical role in the growth trajectory of organizations.  

Reporting a potential incident on time enables more efficient management of the same, whereas reporting too late or not reporting incidents at all can have severe and even fatal consequences.

Let’s understand more about incident management and how delayed reporting can impact your organization’s growth.

 

WHAT IS INCIDENT MANAGEMENT?

An incident is defined in different ways as per the industry it is taking place in. For instance, an injury at a construction site will be categorized as an incident. In the same way, a malfunctioning printer at a retail outlet could be said to be an incident.

But, no matter the industry, and its definition of an incident, they have one thing in common – they disrupt the core business of your org. This is where incident management kicks in. 

Incident management assists you in resolving issues so that you and your employees receive assistance as quickly as possible. It also ensures the least of the core business is harmed.

On the other hand, delayed incident reporting could mean delayed issue resolution. In some industries, like manufacturing and construction, delaying resolutions could even have fatal consequences aside from wasting time and money.  

Moreover, incident reporting or managing security issues or incidents employees report reveal how your organization is managed. And it can show whether or not your organization is efficient enough in providing resolutions.

Therefore, it is essential to understand the after-effects of delayed incident reporting to maintain the integrity of an organization.

HOW CAN DELAYED INCIDENT REPORTING IMPACT YOUR BUSINESS?

Here’s how delayed incident reporting can leave a negative impact on an organization:

  • Increases organizational cost

A delay in incident reporting may result in more expensive remediation and extended downtime. In addition, if the incident is not reported immediately, it may be challenging to find the root cause without a comprehensive trace log.

In addition, it may be challenging to identify the full extent of the incident, which then makes it difficult to determine what actions should be taken to remediate the issue. As a result, the time and effort of the employer are wasted, which results in additional expenses.

  • Impacts the integrity of the organization

A poorly managed incident system can bring a company’s integrity down. Therefore, it is important to keep top of how your organization runs incident management operations and improve your system to keep your employees safer.

On-time reports lead to on-time actions, which result in the proper completion of tasks and reduced risks. A robust incident reporting mechanism will help improve company performance and make achieving business goals a breeze.

  • Leads to unnecessary lawsuits

Employers may suffer legal consequences if they fall behind on important safety reports. So many incidents happen every day on a construction site, for instance.

These incidents could be anything from a worker falling off a ladder to getting hurt by a tool. These incidents can cause a lot of damage and lead to a lawsuit if incidents are not reported quickly.

  • Delays issue resolution

A company always focuses on providing the best services to its employees. If an incident is not reported timely, the employer cannot take any action to resolve the issue.

For example, if an employee does not report an injury on time, the employer won’t be able to take the following steps to resolve the same.

For instance, in the case of an injury at a construction site, an employee might need medical compensation, and delayed reporting in such a case will delay receiving medical compensation benefits.

HOW DOES A TIMELY DIGITAL INCIDENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM HELP?

The price of a delayed incident reporting policy can be devastating to a business’s reputation and financial stability. Here are the benefits if you adopt a digital incident management system:

  • Quick resolution time

If incidents are recorded, logged, and reported timely, an organization can quickly act to evade potential harm to the core business. Orgs can also track incident patterns and resolve similar issues quickly in the future.

  • Reduces overhead of reporting

Incident reporting can be a tedious task and may involve multiple employers investing their time and efforts.

On the other hand, an automatic inspection management tool will reduce the overhead and generate reports faster when compared to the traditional approach of manually collating data from multiple scattered platforms.

  • Builds a communication channel between employee and employer

With the help of the digital incident reporting tool, it’s easier to report incidents to the management.

Incident management tools facilitate an efficient and smooth incident logging process. All an employee has to do is report incidents through the tool and the organization can take action accordingly—no chances of miscommunication or misinterpretation.

The bottom line is that reporting incidents and issues sooner is significantly more beneficial to your business than not doing the same.

The BARE-IFY Audit App is an advanced safety compliance and auditing tool is an audit and inspection platform with robust incident reporting mechanisms and super user-centric UI. With the help of this tool, organizations can automate the incident reporting process and reduce the amount of human intervention involved.

By making your company’s incident reporting process more straightforward, you’ll reduce the time your employees spend in reporting incidents and automatically cut back on opportunistic mistakes.

Pulse also offers ready-to-use checklists for multiple industries so that you can stay on the top of your compliance game and reduce the chances of incidents.

Go! China’s Dream Team!

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Last Friday, China office received a special gift from one of our clients, Kantar TNS, all the way from London, UK. It was a simple card saying “THANK YOU DREAM TEAM” and a “Thank-you” cake, but the meaning and sincerity behind this was neither simple nor easy.

Imagine searching for and finding a cake-delivery vendor in a country that you do not have much understanding of, in terms of culture or language. Well, that’s what our client – Kantar TNS – did, just to reward our efforts in the recent HSBC audit project in Hong Kong, China.

This is the first time BARE China partner with Kantar TNS UK directly, and the reason why the client wants to express their “thank-you” in such a touching way is also simple (but not easy to achieve) – we WOWed them.

For this pilot project planned to be finished in 5 weeks, our KAM – Lock Chen – devoted extra time and energy to finish it ahead of time in less than 4 weeks with good results. Throughout the project, Lock went above and beyond to try to provide solutions that exceeded the client’s expectations or requests. There were days when Lock left the office after 11pm, and also times when Lock and the Operations Director ST Chong frequently exchanged ideas even during vacations. For data quality checks, Kristen (DQ Team Leader) coordinated and Caroline (DQ Specialist) devoted extra time to ensure the reports were of tip top quality.

All these efforts have been remembered and rewarded. Not just from a cake and a card, but also from the understanding and cooperation of the whole team and the client.

There is still much work to be done before we are able to devote ourselves in providing services beyond the client’s expectations every single time, but this is a testament of our progress and we will take this as a motivation to continue to strive for excellence.