FESmag

At the start of the New Year most of us think about improvements for 2008. On the personal side, many people's intent is to trim their waistlines. In contrast, many businesses look to expand their bottom lines, so to speak. Given that I am not a health expert, I will steer clear of offering suggestions about how to reduce one's waistline.

What I would like to do, though, is pose a few questions operators should answer as they look to meet their performance-based objectives for the years ahead. These questions may be most appropriate for those working in a restaurant, but equipment manufacturers, distributors or consultants should also tune in to what will make their clients successful.

I feel very strongly about equipment manufacturers' responsibility to share their clients' business challenges. If a supplier does not understand their clients' challenges, how can they contribute to their customers' success? That commitment is what will make a supplier a valued partner vs. a vendor and allow both client and supplier to grow together.

That said, over the next few posts, I will pose some things to think about to improve performance for 2008.

Do we understand our customer demand patterns? Week-to-week? Day-to-day? Hour-to-hour? Knowing when customers visit and what they order is a critical step in labor scheduling, food production and capacity planning.

What is your performance criteria? Establish performance criteria and then measure. Critical control points determine overall performance and should be measured. Hold the management team accountable to concept-specific performance metrics.

Where are labor dollars really spent? Make sure that most of your limited labor dollars are spent on tasks that actually add value for customers. There are highly accurate ways to quantify the work content in every task.

In my next post we'll examine managers, concept constraints and the investment in equipment. If you have any other areas you'd like to see covered, please let me know.