It’s essential for operations directors to monitor the heartbeat of their restaurant business. Here are seven metrics you need to watch — in real-time.
Meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential for anyone managing restaurant operations. When food costs are high, margins and tight, and retaining good staff is a challenge, there’s no room for sluggish performance. You need efficiency and optimisation in every area of the business.
But before exploring some of the important metrics available via restaurant technology, it’s worth defining what’s valuable — and what’s useless, or even misleading.
Good figures Vs bad ones
What operations directors need most are numbers they can trust that tell them everything about the business at any given moment.
They don’t need a smattering of fresh figures spoilt by pools of stagnant data and shrouded by a series of ‘unknowns’. Instead, they require an all-in-one system that operates in ‘real-time’, free from data silos. This should reveal the true picture of deliveries, batch production, inventory, breakages, labour costs, sales — and everything in between, at any given moment.
When one number changes, it should be reflected across the rest of the data, instantly. Only then can insights be truly actionable. That’s the essence of Next-Gen restaurant technology that today’s businesses need to survive and thrive.
Seven metrics to watch
With Syrve, operations directors can easily access these KPIs via the cloud on their laptops or mobile phones. These seven real-time metrics can prove especially useful:
#1: Ingredient cross-reference:
It’s useful to know the importance of each ingredient to your menu — when it comes to sourcing enough fresh supplies at the right price. This report will show you all the products that contain a particular item as an ingredient.
#2: Purchasing discrepancies:
You can always check if goods were delivered to order, on time, and for the quantity/price expected. The system automatically matches your purchase orders with corresponding purchase invoices used to book in the goods.
#3: Stock balance:
You can see the number of goods and prepared items in stock. Use this to monitor and replenish your inventory, identify expired foodstuffs and adjust negative balances.
#4: Sales reports for a specific period:
You can get detailed information on the quantity and amount of sales of items and goods per location. This can include products, prices, how many dishes were sold, discounts and revenue.
#5: ABC/XYZ analysis of goods:
One of the ways to boost your restaurant’s sales is to improve your menu, prioritising higher margin items that have a consistent demand. The ABC analysis helps you to identify bestsellers by groups, so you can decide whether to increase mark-up, lower costs, or remove items. Meanwhile, the XYZ analysis charts the consistency of sales.
#6: Revenue reports:
Where, when and how precisely is your money arriving into your business? With revenue reports, you can assess revenue per day of the week or hour of the day, by waiter, payment type, or dish category.
#7: Profit and loss:
You can view information about all revenue received by a restaurant outlet, as well as expenditures and losses. These can include your very latest figures — or a particular period of time. There’s no sweating over spreadsheets. It’s all at your fingertips, instantly.
And there’s more
Next-Gen restaurant technology will give you a vast array of metrics in real-time.
You can also see the implications of ‘what if’ scenarios. You can use the system to assess menu changes, supplier consolidation and other potential alterations — and then decide if you want to implement them.
Around the world, more restaurants are discovering that becoming data-driven can give them an edge. You can watch your business 24/7, make changes instantly and optimise performance.
