In every Restaurant Organization, your District Managers (DM’s) play a pivotal role in helping each restaurant flourish. As they conduct store visits, DM’s coach General Managers and Franchisees on how to run their store better, acting the part of the “Operational Guru”. During these visits, each District Manager inspects individual locations with a variety of tasks and questions, commonly using a paper/excel based inspection form.

This method, leads to a range of issues for management:

• Inability to update and manage field inspection forms
• Dissimilar inspection forms in the field
• Poor inspection form criteria

Arming your District Managers with accurate and up to date field assessments is key to maintaining the level of consistency required to create a scalable restaurant chain. If the DM doesn’t know what constitutes an excellent performing store operationally, then there is little hope that the Franchisee or General Manager will have any better of an understanding. This can be a problematic situation for management. With an excel based field assessment form, there is no proper way to update all your forms at once, as each individual DM must be emailed the new excel file with every iteration. Regardless of the change, whether it is a single question or an entire category, a new excel file is required…every single time. Not being able to make changes in real time will produce multiple assessment forms across your organization, resulting in your team possessing no “official” list. In a worst-case scenario, different DM’s visit their respective stores evaluating them on incorrect criteria due to the outdated instructions they believe to be correct.

As these alternate and outdated versions circulate your organization, the quality of the actual assessment will suffer. Due to the difficult nature of managing the form, the questions are generally updated infrequently. Management is often deterred from creating a robust assessment list because the only way to truly make one is by continuous review with consistent use. A digital solution avoids these issues, automatically pushing every member of an organization the updated assessment in real time, regardless of the changes completed.