by Whitney McCarthy | Feb 8, 2018 | Engage, RizePoint
RizePoint®, the leading provider of quality management software, today announced the 2018 winners of its annual Engage Spark Awards. The awards highlight innovation among its foodservice, hospitality and retail clients. The 2018 awards cover four categories: food safety, supplier quality management, super user and innovation.
“RizePoint’s clientele are creating better experiences for consumers worldwide,” said Frank Maylett, President and CEO of RizePoint. “The Spark Awards recognize the talented team members who create operational excellence in today’s experience economy.”
Recipients were honored today during the Engage Conference at the Mirage Las Vegas. Engage—RizePoint’s annual user conference—featured boot camps, educational sessions and thought leadership about food safety trends, blockchain and business intelligence. The keynote featured Denise Lee Yohn, a nationally recognized brand strategist and proven leader in driving strategy for Burger King, Jack in the Box, Land Rover, Target and Sony Electronics.
The 2018 Engage Spark Award winners include:
Food Safety Spark – Friendly’s
Friendly’s commitment to food safety and quality is evident in its audits and reporting. In 2018, the company made the practice audit a standard to help prepare employees on how to prevent food safety concerns daily. They are an industry leader, ensuring that all Friendly’s restaurants are committed to customer safety and brand standards.
Supplier Quality Spark – McDonald’s
McDonald’s is the world’s leading global foodservice retailer with approximately 37,000 locations. The company has strict supplier standards and uses RizePoint in more than 48 countries to ensure suppliers meet all quality assurance, safety, and regulatory standards.
Innovator Spark – IHG
IHG continues to lead the hospitality industry with its commitment to high brand standards and consistency across more than 5,000 locations. In 2018, the company created self-assessments for all hotels to help them prepare for their on-site quality evaluations. They also use RizePoint for new hotel openings to ensure everything is completed for a smooth, timely and accurate opening.
“Super User” Spark – Hard Rock International
Hard Rock International uses RizePoint for its annual Brand Compliance evaluation. In the first year of its Mobile Auditor-based evaluation process Hard Rock saw a five percent average increase in brand compliance globally. They harness RizePoint for mystery shops and new property openings and have been pioneering new and unique ways to deploy RizePoint across 74 countries.
RizePoint At-a-Glance
- RizePoint mobile and cloud-based software helps organizations improve the quality, safety, and sustainability of their products, services and facilities.
- RizePoint’s software is used by 5 of the top 8 hospitality brands and 5 of the top 8 food service brands.
- RizePoint serves more than 387,000 users in 120 countries and territories, speaking 40 languages:
- 105,000 food service restaurants
- 27,000 hotels and resort properties
- 13,000 grocery and retail stores
About RizePoint
RizePoint is the global leader in Quality Experience Management SaaS solutions. RizePoint software creates a hub of valuable compliance information to align organizational focus on brand protection. Dedicated to helping our customers deliver a positive brand experience, RizePoint serves more than 2 million audits with 300 million questions answered annually. Considered the industry standard for food service, hospitality, and retail, RizePoint is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information, visit www.rizepoint.com.
by Nisha Burke | Oct 27, 2016 | Engage, RizePoint
The most anticipated session of the RizePoint Engage conference.
When asked, “what do you want to get out of the RizePoint Engage user conference?” users commonly proclaim that they want to learn how others use the RizePoint system. It’s true, RizePoint’s Management Console and Mobile Auditor solutions are so robust, and can be used in so many ways, it’s a terrific idea to understand how others put the system to work in their operations.
That’s just what we got to the bottom of in the Engage User Panel session at this year’s conference. This year’s panelist included:
- Paula Popoli, Sr. Project Manager of Resort Operations at Marriott Vacations Worldwide
- Kelly Toce, QA Analyst at Sodexo
- And, Joe Ventimiglia, Operations Services Manager, Checkers and Rally’s Restaurants
The panelists shared their thoughts on a variety of topics and we’ve captured the highlights for you here today:
The first question for the panelists dove right into the heart of what the attendees wanted to learn. Nisha Burke, panel moderator and Product Marketing Manager at RizePoint, asked about the unique ways the panelists use RizePoint. Joe Ventimiglia, of Checkers and Rally’s, presented on this topic the day before the panel but still had plenty to share. He explained that Checkers and Rally’s utilizes RizePoint across nine departments, in both corporate-owned and franchise-owned restaurants. Paula Popoli of Marriott Vacations World Wide also weighed in to describe how her team started with two RizePoint forms and now has over 60 forms to automate everything from WiFi checks to fire safety drills.
When asked, “what do you find most useful in the RizePoint system?” Joe gave details about how they have a form to track the transition of a restaurant from corporate-owned to franchise-owned and vice versa. The form includes the inventory of the restaurant as well as the condition of all items so owners know the state of their new restaurant.
Joe went on to share the time when he had an ah-ha moment that helped him use the system in a bigger way when he heard Best Western talk about how they use RizePoint to manage construction projects. Joe thought, “We do construction too, and I bet we could benefit from the visibility and accountability that RizePoint brings to processes.”
The panel session then turned to helping new users become pros at using RizePoint. Kelly Toce of Sodexo explained that it is important to know that anyone can use the system. Even if you’ve never had experience with auditing or systems, don’t panic and don’t be afraid. The RizePoint system, and the team of subject matter experts that go along with it, will help you out. She described the importance of mapping out processes, creating process maps, and building smart sheets in order to accurately build audits. She advised attendees that the more planning you complete up front, the more solid your audits will be when you are done.
After new users’ uncertainties were put to rest, Paula shifted gears and shared details with the audience on how her organization takes advantage of self-auditing. She explained that her franchisees use this proactive opportunity by sending fire safety audit results directly to the insurance company. This ensures that all sites are up-to-code and all documents are in one place. Joe explained how Checkers & Rally’s requires 13 self-audits per year. The average quarterly score is used to award a Gold or Silver restaurant status. RizePoint makes this self-audit process easy to administer and track progress.
Kelly took control of the panel conversation at this point to share the importance of her relationships with other RizePoint users. She explained that if you are trying to use the system to accomplish a particular goal, there is likely another user that has been there before. Sharing insights, tips and tricks, and best practices can really take an initiative to the next level. Kelly recommended that Engage attendees not only forge strong relationships with other users at the conference but continue those relationships throughout the year in order to learn from each other and share information.
Before moving to audience questions, the panel addressed a request to share recent trends. When asked, “what are you seeing in your job today that you did not see a few years ago, or even last year?” the panelists all shared their perceptions of what today and the future have in store: more departments are requesting RizePoint forms. Joe noted that he even created a RizePoint form for departments to submit requests – the form includes questions about who will perform the audit, who will receive the report, and the report format requested. Kelly now shares reports with the SVP team and the CEO. The reports are a powerful way to provide information to all levels of the organization and especially those people that are always on the road.
To wrap-up the session, Nisha posed one last question to the panelists that asked them to look into the future, “do you see any new trends in brand protection specifically? In other words, are you taking any new steps now, that you didn’t previously, to proactively protect your brand reputation?” Paula said she is busier than ever because of the demand for the RizePoint reports. Kelly and Joe talked about how they share the Executive Summary of reports and attach details. This minor detail is a powerful way to communicate all audit results across the organization.
The theme from this session was that RizePoint and the attendees are focused on brand protection and standards compliance. After hearing from the panelists and the audience, it is clear that everyone at Engage is committed to creating a flawless customer experience.
by Nisha Burke | Oct 24, 2016 | Engage, RizePoint
A Recap from RizePoint Engage Conference
Dealing with regulations isn’t the easiest task in life. Sure, regulations are a common part of our everyday lives in the foodservice, hospitality, and retail worlds, but facing new regulations can feel a bit like facing an opponent. It’s just business and we know regulations are designed to protect us all. But, let’s be honest when we have the responsibility to master the regulations facing our organizations, we want to beat those regulations. We want to win when facing the daunting tasks these regulations require of us.
In this blog post, we are going to look at some of the challenges often faced when addressing common regulatory requirements and for each, we’ll dive into different advantages you already have in place by choosing RizePoint.
Let’s look at the first challenge we face, an opponent if you will, when addressing regulations:
Process Implementation — “The Execution Nightmare”
Whether you’re researching the new processes restaurants have put in place after they’ve had issues, or you’re looking into the preventative control requirements of the Food Safety Modernization Act, or FSMA, this BEAST of an opponent can make implementing new processes feel quite daunting at first, but you have a strong RizePoint tool in your corner.
RizePoint not only offers a dedicated Program Compliance product module that can help you ensure new processes are correctly implemented at every level of your organization, we also have subject matter experts that help you break down and get through all of the “legalese” you face when studying regulations. Plus, we’ll help you make small tweaks to your processes in order to meet regulatory requirements and never cause you to enact major changes that disrupt operations.
The second opponent often faced when dealing with regulations is:
Easily Obtainable Data — “The Accessibility Devil”
RizePoint knows the importance of ensuring people can access the data they need immediately. No matter what. This MONSTER opponent can be found in various regulations such as FSMA regulations related to the availability of records.
If you haven’t thought about it before, you might be surprised how many ways RizePoint makes your data easily accessible to you. Because users access audit results and other data from the web-based RizePoint Management Console, the data they need is always available, from anywhere. Plus, users can take advantage of file storage options at the location level so items like Health Department scores, HAACP plans, and other critical information can also be easily accessed through the RizePoint Management Console. And, finally, with RizePoint’s new active home page and robust management dashboards, the most critical details are right at the forefront of your system so you never miss anything important. There are a lot of reasons to feel confident going up against this opponent using RizePoint.
Our next regulatory opponent is:
Protected, Secured Data — “The Record Bomber”
If you’re going to have easily accessible data, that data must be secure and protected. Again, you won’t believe how many ways RizePoint protects your data from this PRETTY TOUGH opponent while still making it easily accessible. All data is stored on RizePoint owned and managed hardware. Plus, single sign on, permissions and roll-based access ensure the data is always secure and never accessed by those who should not have access to it.
Our fourth opponent may very well be our toughest:
Ongoing Validation of Quality — “Merciless Mediocrity”
This is an opponent that we are all familiar with and it can be a fierce one. But, driving and validating quality is what brings us all together under the umbrella of enterprise compliance. You needn’t look any further than the monitoring requirements of FSMA to see this opponent in action. And, we see FSMA hitting all aspects of our client base of hospitality and, of course, food service; even transportation. Frankly, auditing and surveying in order to validate quality are at the core of everything we do at RizePoint. The reason why we are all here at RizePoint is to drive and validate quality. RizePoint is dedicated to being your partner for life in this area. After all, the RizePoint mission is:
To foster brand protection and loyalty, ever-improving quality, and ultimately greater revenues and profitability for our customers.
We bring the tools, technology, and expertise to always beat the merciless mediocrity opponent – to proactively safeguard your compliance standards – for both internally-imposed standards and, of course, externally-imposed regulations.
We’re not only focused together on validating quality but we are also in it together in the area of driving continuous improvements…which is our final item today.
Continuous Improvements — “The Deteriorator”
This KILLAH opponent is what is required to ensure a positive customer experience every time. It’s not just good enough to maintain the standards we have in place today but it’s in the act of looking forward to next level standards and driving continuous improvements that can really raise the bar. Whether you are looking at the corrective action requirements of FSMA, or just taking in all the headlines of when this opponent has gotten the better of others, it is clear that driving continuous improvements is critical.
RizePoint offers corrective action automation within the RizePoint Management Console to help ensure that continuous improvement standards are quickly met at every location in which our clients operate. Plus, when important items need to be addressed, RizePoint pulls those to the surface and makes it easy for regional and local managers to quickly remedy issues.
Needless to say, you know you have a friend in RizePoint when it comes to driving corrective actions in order to see continuous improvements. And, this is really where competitive advantages come into play. There are dozens of “wanna-be’s” who want to be like you. Continuous improvements help you outpace the competition. This is another way RizePoint works to meet our operational pillar of building lasting customer success. Helping you stay ahead of your competition is important to us. When you’re successful, we’re successful.
Using RizePoint tools to help your operation drive quality is a wise choice, especially when facing the daunting opponents of regulatory requirements. If you haven’t already, I challenge you to look into some of the many ways RizePoint can provide assistance as you work to master the regulations your organization faces.
