Being able to identify core operational issues across your restaurant chain can be difficult regardless of the size of your organization. Whether you stand at a few or a few hundred locations, having access to the correct data is key to recognizing areas of improvement. Paper and excel based field assessments limit your access to quality data in a few ways:
- Poor data collection methods
- Inability to see aggregated data
- No business trend scoring
The main method of data tracking for District Managers (DM) in the field is with hand-written notes. While visiting each store, DM's use a pen and paper to jot down notes on the store, including the assessment checklist. In doing this, data is originally tracked on paper before it can be inputted into excel. Only once the entire store walk-around has been completed does the DM enter all the assessment data into Excel. This is an extremely manual process prone to human error while hindering the quality of data available. Additionally, the types of possible inputs are limited, which hinders the value of the data collected. With poor data collection, it’s difficult to identify common issues both at individual locations and across the organization.
Using paper and excel, each DM can input data for the individual store that they visited. If your chain has 30 locations, you might have 3 different DM's conducting assessment across your organization. With each DM conducting individual assessments on 10 locations, that’s 30 total Excel files, each with unique scoring, notes and action plans. The question now becomes, how do you effectively and accurately aggregate these 30 individual reports into a single view? The answer: you can’t. At least not in a timely manner. When these 30 reports are merged, the data in them could be outdated as coordinating the completion of a master Excel file like this is no easy feat.
Without proper aggregated data, it’s challenging to identify the core issues and trends occurring across the organization. By analyzing single reports, it’s almost impossible to understand which operational components are consistently failing or, alternatively, succeeding. The lack of insight into the business can ultimately be detrimental to a restaurant chain attempting to grow.
With a digital field assessment tool, each report from each location is aggregated together into a single unified location. This presents thoughtful data with actionable information to help ensure your chain is successful. To learn more, feel free to click on the link below:
