by Kari Hensien | Nov 12, 2015 | Food Safety, RizePoint
Like everyone else who reads about outbreaks of foodborne illness, my heart immediately goes out to the people who have fallen ill. But I also find myself sending mental sympathies to the unfortunate organizations that unwittingly served up pathogens.
Although outbreaks might seem to be a matter of ill fortune, they mostly are not.
It’s tempting for eatery owners and managers to focus on the freshness, flavor, and appearance of their offerings — the things that are easy to see. But to truly protect your customers and business, you must get into the nitty-gritty and difficulties of managing the things you can’t see — namely pathogens such as E.coli and salmonella — which can arrive on even the most upscale, finely farmed foods.
If this sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it is. But it’s worth the effort. One outbreak can drive away loyal customers, drive down stock prices, and put even the most successful eating establishments on the skids.
The good news is that using food safety best practices and crafting auditable policies around them is easier than ever. With a good quality management solution in place, chances are excellent that you’ll never find your eatery’s name in the news. Here’s what you can do to get started.
Food Safety Best Practices
- Educate Employees
You can’t follow the rules if you don’t know them. Thorough onboarding and continual training are your first line of defense. Make initial and regular instruction part of an automated action plan so sessions are easy to track and lapses are simple to correct. Follow up with mandatory and optional food-safety instructions with periodic reminders.
- Keep Workspaces Clean
Cleanliness is the first commandment when it comes to food safety best practices. Work areas should be cleaned using the right soaps, cleansers, and techniques to stay safe. Again, auditing stores and employees and using those audits to trigger trainings is the proven way to keep workspaces scrupulously clean.
- Mandate Handwashing Policies
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends 20 seconds of scrub time with soap. Posting reminders can prompt your employees to achieve this goal, but if you have a “smart” sink, an automated food-safety auditing system can measure how long employees lather up. This way you can know when more training is needed.
- Buy from Reputable Suppliers
Food-contamination vectors abound: unsanitary water, poor harvest-time handling, dirty warehousing, and so forth, all increase the odds of food contamination. Suppliers are your eyes on the ground that can help stop issues before they hit your door.
Consider suppliers with great reputations over the lowest bids. Once you have suppliers, audit them and work with them to do their own audits. Blockchain technology and automated software will help them and you understand where problems occur so recalls can happen fast.
- Wash All Produce
Even prewashed, pre-packaged produce can carry contaminates. No matter how much you trust your suppliers and train your employees, it’s important to audit each party when it comes to produce. If vendors and employees wash produce in a clean environment using clean water and handle it with clean hands, you know the washing has been done correctly.
- Monitor Food Temperatures
Poorly stored and improperly cooked foods increase the odds that pathogens will survive long enough to infect your customers. Regularly auditing storage areas and temperatures as well as cooking temperatures is key to keeping food safe. You can even use cloud-based software and thermocouple integration can even give you automated alerts in real time when temperatures are out of whack.
- Avoid Cross Contamination
To decrease contamination risks, different utensils and work surfaces should be used during different processes of food prep and cooking. Raw and cooked foods should never be handled with the same utensils or on the same surfaces.
- Stop Sick Employees from Working
No matter how short-handed you are, letting a sick employee work is a huge food-safety issue. An outbreak can have long-lasting effects to your business, but an employee recovering at home has an incredibly short-term effect on your business. For this reason, it’s smart to provide paid sick days for employees whenever possible.
- Stay Up-to-date with Regulations
FSMA is a huge concern for your business, but it isn’t your only worry. A number of state, federal, and international agencies issue food-safety regulations and recommendations. Organizations such as NSF International compile these regulations into physical handy volumes or digitized files that auditors can take into the field for reference. Regulations change in response to new research and new types of products, and your audits have to reflect those changes. This process can become simplified if you use a digital auditing service.
- Use Digital Auditing
When you go digital, several things get easier for you. You can gather data in a searchable, central database; with that data, you can see issues earlier and before they become huge problems; and all together this means you can act and pivot quickly before any internal issues becomes tomorrow’s headline. You can also immediately update audit forms, regulation materials, and other documents across your whole organization, which means everyone can stay on top of new rules. Click here to see what you should look for when seeking out a quality management solution.
If you’re ready to learn more about Ready-to-Eat food safety, click here.
by Di Lewis | Oct 23, 2015 | Business Intelligence, RizePoint
Many companies dedicate a lot of time and resources collecting large amounts of data, but unfortunately allow it to go into a black hole. Data capturing should be utilized to drive positive change. Otherwise, why do it?
Here are four possible reasons why ineffective data capturing occurs, and ideas on how to avoid the pitfalls.
- Collecting too much data. A company can only use so much information so they need to prioritize and collect only data that they intend to use. I’ve seen operational excellence forms that contain hundreds of questions. After doing a deep dive with the VP of operations, we determined that more than 25 percent of the questions were not important — and that no one was even looking at the results. So this company removed those questions, which produced a feedback report far more meaningful. Those responsible for taking action were less overwhelmed and saw more value in what they were acting on.
- No culture of follow-up. There’s no buy-in at the C-level that taking action is critical. C-level executives must set the example and take action after receiving high-level business intelligence information. If the leaders don’t take action, no one else will. Everyone will assume “no one cares.” It’s much easier for a C-level exec to take action if they have detailed, enterprise-level dashboards and reports to base decisions on. As you can imagine, a CEO or COO doesn’t have time to sort through volumes of data. Customized dashboards help them get the key information they need in real time.
- No rewards or incentives to encourage follow-up. And/or there are no repercussions if the follow-up doesn’t happen. In other words, no one is held accountable. Many times I’ve asked managers the question, “What happens if a location has repeat critical violations?” I often get a blank look or they say, “Ummmmmmmm… I’m not sure,” or “Nothing happens.” Nothing happens? Really? If a restaurant manager knows that “nothing will happen” if he or she doesn’t follow up, then guess what — this manager typically doesn’t follow up. At some point there has to be repercussions if critical violations are not addressed. For example, if a franchisee “fails” an inspection they may be required to foot the bill for a re-inspection. On the flip side, a rewards or incentive program for those who do follow up in a timely manner can really drive improvement. But the incentive doesn’t necessarily have to be monetary. Companies can get creative on how they reward managers who have strong track records of follow-up.
- The systems for capturing data are antiquated. Outdated data-capturing methods or systems don’t allow for easy action. These methods include using a pen and paper or an electronic spreadsheet, which are less than user friendly. Just last month I was talking to a contact at a restaurant chain that had a location actually shut down by the health department. I recommended that they implement a self-inspection program to encourage managers to be more proactive. They shared with me that managers are required to do self-inspections, but the reports are done on paper and just get filed away. No one sees them or reacts to them. They agreed this is really a waste of their manager’s time if no one is going to follow up. This is a perfect example of how an automated data-capture platform could make this process easier and more user friendly. An automated process would allow the reports to be more visible to various levels of management and would also allow for automated notifications to go out to those responsible for follow up.
Bringing data to life can drive positive results throughout the entire organization. Capturing data just for the sake of having it is a waste of time. Capturing meaningful data in a user-friendly platform like RizePoint is valuable and will take you to the next level. Click here to learn more!
by Whitney McCarthy | Sep 11, 2015 | Food Safety, Quality Management System, RizePoint
If you work in the hospitality or the food service industries, you know just how important every step along the supply chain and every detail is — from the raw product to the finished service. Food safety and quality management systems are essential to ensure that your business is following all regulations at each point in the process. But it also helps you ensure that your clients, customers, and end users get a product that is safe, up to your quality standards, and up to your brand standards.
If you’re thinking about investing in a food safety and quality management system, here are four key benefits that will maximize your return on investment in no time.
1. Save Tons of Time
Without any type of structured food safety and quality management systems in place, the only option is to use old-school tracking with pencil and paper or computer-based spreadsheets. These practices are extremely vulnerable to both intentional and accidental human error. Additionally, these methods require by-hand processing, analyzing, and data manipulation to make meaningful conclusions about your business. All that adds up to hours of time — time that can be reduced with digital data gathering as well as compliance and report automation.
2. Easily Aggregate Data
With digitized quality management, the hours you spent on tracking and analyzing data by hand will feel like a bad dream you never have to have again. Analytic software programs are simple to use and will help you create efficient food safety or quality management systems that help you pivot and act quickly when needed. When new data arrives, the software immediately integrates and sorts the information into a variety of different reports and analytics. This means that within seconds you can get comprehensive and up-to-the-minute evaluations of the entire system down to the smallest data point, turning your data into a reporting powerhouse.
3. Automate Tracking & Reporting
When you convert to software for your quality management or food safety systems, you can track and monitor everything from food temperatures to shipment travel times. The software can be linked to a single-truth source for standards or specs, it can send alerts and automated action plans when standards are not met, and it can create reports in seconds that can be shared immediately with stakeholders.
4. Collaborate Effortlessly with Stakeholders
With the ability to have multiple people communicating, coordinating, and checking the data immediately, you’ll increase your compliance in food safety and quality management. Digitized platforms give you the ability to identify areas of potential problems quickly and efficiently, and automated notifications will keep managers informed and empowered to follow up on corrective action. Since the data is available from any type of device — including smartphones, tablets, and computers — managers aren’t tied to the office to stay in full control of their areas of responsibility.
Click here to see if RizePoint is the right digitized food safety and quality management system for you.
by Di Lewis | Sep 11, 2015 | Business Intelligence, RizePoint
Whether you’re a business owner or a manager in your organization, you know the complexities of trying to assess the big picture of how your business is operating on a day-by-day (or even task-by-task) basis. In today’s data-driven business environment, there is simply too much data to manage manually—in a spreadsheet or similar fashion.
Why should you consider business intelligence performance management software? We’ve identified 3 key immediate benefits.
- Simplify and Save
Business intelligence software will save a tremendous amount of time, by simplifying the process of collecting data from all your departments and reporting your data in a format that’s easy to read and digest. Typically the tools in your general computer office suite don’t offer the right tools to accurately capture and analyze your data in real time. With so much on your plate, business intelligence performance management software can dramatically improve how your view and manage everything about your job.
- On-Demand Data
You’re busy. You’re dealing with all types of real world issues, and you certainly can’t spend your day pouring over databases and spreadsheets of information. However, imagine how much easier this type of real time assessment would be if you had a completely accessible business intelligence software system that you could access from your mobile device, any time. Any day.
- Customizable
Now, go even a bit further and imagine that business intelligence performance management software could be fully customized for your requirements. You could track and record the data that you needed in one integrated system that automatically populated all the reports, charts and graphs that required that data.
- Alerts to Keep you Informed
You control when and how you see your reports and data, and you can set alerts to automatically signal you with when threshold levels were met or were not met, depending on what you’re tracking.
- Collaborate
Business intelligence performance management software are used by a variety of businesses to ensure that all the stakeholders have both the details as well as the big picture view of the entire company process. They use business intelligence performance management software to work collaboratively, share information, and even send messages through the system to those with authorized access to the software.
- Corrective Action Management
Put an action plan in place to correct performance issues, and a business intelligence performance management corrective action tools can help you track the changes and completion of the action plan. By enabling constant improvements to operations and quality, a business intelligence performance management platform is an integral and highly efficient tool for your business.
by Di Lewis | Sep 11, 2015 | Business Intelligence, RizePoint
At the end of the day, success is measured by how well your organization serves customers and achieves financial goals. This is much harder than one might think—it requires a well-managed operations team that can consistently meet and exceed specific standards of quality.
It goes without saying that enterprise business intelligence greatly enhances an organization’s operation. Using business analysis tools in the right way enables managers to better lead operations, help employees meet quality standards, and even increase profit opportunities over time. Whether you use a simple, manually-generated report, or a state-of-the-art auditing tool with real-time business analytics, we would like to offer some best practices for identifying the types of metrics to measure, as well as tips for implementing the results from your data analysis into your organization.
Incorporate a Balanced Scorecard Model
First of all, expand your analytics beyond basic financial and ERP data, using the Balanced Scorecard approach. It’s important to make decisions based on a balanced perspective – which some people call the Balanced Scorecard Approach. This approach provides results among your entire enterprise, including financial performance, operations performance, customer feedback, and organizational learning.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are established to provide specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-phased (SMART) measurement factors. Some examples of restaurant KPIs according to the Balanced Scorecard might include:
- Financial Performance KPIs, such as meeting EBITDA and/or return-on capital goals, or meeting top 25% percentile of QSR industry standard quarterly.
- Operational Performance KPIs, like meeting food and labor cost targets, as well as food waste targets.
- Customer Feedback KPIs show the strength of a company’s relationship with its customers through customer retention, new customer gain, and customer satisfaction.
- Organizational Learning KPIs, which shows company growth and success among people, systems, and organizational procedures, like employee turnover rate, satisfaction, and productivity level.
Compare Enterprise Performance Data to Pre-established KPI’s
Develop a system that allows you to capture operational data from performance assessments and other sources. Many systems have functions that convert data into detailed and even customize-able reports. This technology allows you generate reports instantly, often with real-time data, which allows for streamlined review, analysis, and decisions.
Find Gaps and Fix Problems
Identify root causes and implement corrective action plans that can be tracked, focusing resources on what needs to be done. Knowing the problems makes finding the answers easier. A well-designed scorecard can reveal gaps in the capabilities of people, systems, and procedures, and provide the means for quickly closing these gaps.
Align for Improved Execution
A Balanced Scorecard provides an improved view of your organization’s performance, enabling easier identification of which actions to measure and insight to create and prioritize goals for your team. By clearly communicating goals and providing tools to help individuals meet their KPIs, you will receive the greatest benefits from this model. Some of the most successful organizations have made it the cornerstone of the way they run business. By adopting these principles and aligning corporate goals with business operations, you can streamline strategy leading to breakthrough performance.
by Di Lewis | Sep 11, 2015 | Brand Protection, RizePoint
As an operations professional, you understand the importance of guest satisfaction for your organization’s success. In fact, it comes as no surprise that regular assessments of your brand standards are critical—even essential—in enforcing them across all locations. When it comes to setting up a regular brand audit program, we’d like to offer 3-step process to capture and measure how your brand is delivering its promise.
Step 1: Create a Checklist
The goal is to establish a robust brand assurance assessment checklist to guide the audit process. The checklist will guide the auditor through all the necessary checkpoints. Keep your checklist dynamic, with the ability to be as general or as detailed as possible. If auditors find areas that require further investigation, the checklist should include room to capture that data.Once complete, the standard checklist will help the auditor get back on track to complete the audit.
To create your checklist, start by reviewing your brand standards and policies. Are they clearly measured? Also review any previous audits (in other areas, if brand audits are new for you), corrective actions, procedures, documents and other relevant materials. Look to identify trends and questions that are duplicated or omitted. Are there key areas of concern? Determine the standards you want to enforce across your business and include them in your checklist for regular review.
For brand audits specifically, consider if your checklist answers the following questions: Does our brand deliver what our customers really want? Does our brand stay current on market conditions? Does our brand invest in improvements to provide better value to our customers? Is our pricing strategy is based on customers’ perception of our brand’s value? Is our brand is properly positioned within the marketplace? Is there clear distinction from our competitors? Is our marketing and messaging consistent with what we deliver? And, is there any conflicting messages? Is our brand properly positioned within our corporate structure? Do other corporate sub-brands overlap? Do executives and managers understand what our brand means to our customers? Is our service/product delivered according to our corporate mission, policies and/or quality standards?
With the checklist criteria established, make sure you include written policies, photos, and instructions about how to assess the standard with each question. Give your auditors what they need to know in order to do a thorough review of your brand deliverability. A scoring methodology should account for the importance of your brand standards as they relate to guest experience and satisfaction. For each area to review on your checklist, create a method for scoring it. Over time, you can start to identify areas that need improvement, as well as those where your brand excels.
Step 2: Use Technology to Collect Data and Automate the Corrective Action Management Process
Using a web-based solution drives standardization, automates the audit process, enhances follow-up, and even generates automated reporting. Mobile data-collection tools, such as RizePoint’s mobileAUDITOR, replaces paper inspection forms with electronic audits, and eliminates the need for manual reports. It also allows for photographs of issues to be associated to the audit. Trending on root causes becomes significantly easier as well. Additionally, your audit results are archived in a business intelligence warehouse. Corrective action management tools will automatically dispatch the issues to the appropriate person or team, and will allow you to monitor the process of the corrective action through to completion.
Setting up corrective action plan approval processes assure that the non-compliant item is being dealt with properly. For example, if the carpet is dirty, you would want it to be cleaned – not replaced. Automatic notification technology simplifies the ability to keep on top of your program. Using it allows you to know when a question, a category, or an audit falls below the acceptable standard criteria. It can also be used to remind your locations or your management team to follow up when items are unresolved.
Step 3: Track Improvement Through Business Intelligence Tools
To consistently deliver your brand promise requires a clear vision into what is happening by correlating operations data and understanding of which “best practices” to replicate. You should be able to transform your business by viewing your key performance metrics and passing them along to those who make strategic decisions. Not only knowing what is happening, but more importantly why something is happening will drive your program and your company to new levels of success Regardless of the format you use to monitor your brand delivery, remember the most important aspect: view your brand through the eyes of your customer rather than through your own knowledge of your organization.
At RizePoint, our goal is to make the auditing process simple, quicker, and more accurate. With audit forms built into RizePoint 360 (and customizable), each audit receives uniform data that’s captured in a central location for review, analysis, and next steps. If you’d like to find out how RizePoint can help you set up brand audits for your company, check out our “Audit Fatigue” white paper.
