Does your organization still rely on paper and excel for District Managers to conduct field assessments on your stores? Here we’ve looked at the top 5 reasons why excel based field assessments are hurting your business operations.

1. Time Consuming Inspections
2. Inability to Identify Core Issues
3. Field Assessment Form Management
4. Inability to Add Visual Documentation to an Assessment
5. No Real-Time and Historical Data

Time-Consuming

• Conducting field assessments is a time-consuming process as is. To adequately examine a location, investing an appropriate amount of time is necessary. During each assessment, District Managers (DM) must write out action plans to be followed up with. This is done in conjunction with highlighting problems and taking pictures while keeping it all organized. What makes these assessments unreasonably longer is that once the assessment is complete, the DM must now sit and manually enter all of their data into an excel sheet to be sent out to their Director.

Inability to Identify Core Issues

• Finding common operational problems can be difficult to do for any multi-unit organization. With paper and excel, management is limited in terms of the level of data trending that they can see. Having a Field Manager make quick notes into a single excel file on an individual store by store basis, cannot create the detailed implications required to identify core issues quickly and efficiently. Training an entire organization to perform better is difficult without proper data reporting capabilities.

Field Assessment Form Management

• With District Managers out in the field constantly conducting assessments on different locations, any paper/excel based form can be almost impossible to update. The process required to make any changes to a list is extremely cumbersome. Each member of the team must be emailed an entirely new list with each update regardless of the size or frequency. As result of this, field managers might be using outdated lists that do not reflect the business accurately. With a digital solution, these forms are updated instantly, for everyone.

Adding Visual Documentation to an Assessment

• The adage, pictures tell 1000 words holds true especially when it comes to field assessments. For your District Managers, having the ability to add photos into each report can help improve the documentation of issues. This results in improved coaching opportunities, making very clear what’s been done correctly and incorrectly. With an excel form, it is difficult to properly match individual photos with the corresponding task. A digital form can automatically track, store and send photos with the exact area of the store that they relate to.

Real Time and Historical Data

• When it comes to an Excel sheet, nothing comes quick. Each time an assessment is complete it can take weeks before other team members like Store managers even begin to see information on their location. In some cases, the DM may send a scanned copy of their notes to an office administrator to interpret, delaying further, the time that the data can be received in. There is no option for real time data to be distributed with an excel based inspection form. Now this office administrator must also be responsible for tracking and storing historical assessment data. If a health and safety audit occurs, this historical data can be hugely important and if not accessible, this might be detrimental to the brand.

These are just some of the reasons why using an excel based field assessment form can hurt your restaurant chain’s operations. With a digital solution, these problems can be solved simply, easily and in a cost-effective manner.