The Five Big Losses in F&B Service

The Food & Beverage sector has had one of the strongest comebacks after the disastrous effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw the industry lose $120 billion in the US alone. In 2022, the industry is now witnessing a growth of 30-40%, with the service segment spearheading the attack. Food service firms have already undertaken aggressive expansion, and are not expected to back down.

Yet, this positive change cannot let the industry deter from the serious shortcomings that contributed significantly to its losses. Along with expansion, businesses also need to strengthen their value chain. The best way to do that, is to identify processes that are being grossly mismanaged due to a lack of visibility, then digitize those processes, to improve visibility, and then tweak the processes, to improve on efficiency. To help this digital transformation get started, Grid has identified processes that are vulnerable in this sector:

Hygiene Checks

It's always been critical for F&B businesses to maintain proper hygiene, but post-pandemic the standards and importance have reached an all-time high. Lack of hygiene poses dire consequences, as it directly affects the health of customers who can make or break your business, as well as their perception of your restaurant or brand.

In order to keep a comprehensive record of each employee's hygiene, Grid provides a solution for F&B service businesses. With the Personal Hygiene tracking template, you can track and record your employees' health, hygiene, and grooming, as per your organization's regulations. Each employee's data is mapped according to their store along with a range of checkpoints to help you gauge their current status. Checkpoints monitor uniforms, sanitization, health, protective equipment, hair, and nails, among other things.

Maintenance and Repair

Equipment issues are one of the most frequent types of disruptions that businesses face. Properly addressing and resolving them within a specific period of time is the key to handling them succinctly.

Grid's Repair and Maintenance template is designed to streamline the entire process so that any discrepancies are minimized. There are two parts to the module, namely:

1. Ticket Creation: Filled partially by the employees, it sends an automated notification to the maintenance person who can instantly update the worksheet in terms of the expected time and cost for resolution.
2. Ticket Resolution: After a ticket gets generated and assessed by the maintenance personnel, it gets assigned to a queue in the Ticket Resolution worksheet. Here, the maintenance personnel can update the status of the ticket in terms of resolved, pending, or waiting on material.

Quality Assurance

In the F&B industry, businesses have to commit religiously to ensuring quality and hygiene. Mismanagement and discrepancies could cause significant harm to the consumers and the brand's reputation. With the number of distinct processes involved, it's only rational to manage and regulate the functioning of your outlets with consistent and thorough QA audits which can be accelerated with digitization.

At the time of auditing a store, the QA Audit template captures any irregularities that may be observed. This is a two-step process that involves the auditing personnel and the auditee's store manager. The auditing personnel can easily score the outlet's performance, with images and remarks to further elaborate their findings. The Store Manager can then directly take action as per the entries, and update the auditing personnel via the application. The template also consists of a dashboard that converts all the data collected in this process to insightful KPIs.

Invoice Management

It has become increasingly important for fast-moving businesses, especially in the F&B sector, to automate their invoicing process. It's simply too difficult to manage the variety and quantity of materials used on a daily basis without making a lot of mistakes.

Your entire invoicing process is digitized with the Purchase Invoice template, from creation to verification to assessment and tracking. It contains three steps taking place one after the other:

1. Creation of an invoice: Users can easily select the region, vendor, type of bill, item category, and document type, and instantly upload the total amount with the supporting document.
2. Verification by management: The Store Manager can then quickly assess and approve the entries with one single click.
3. Final Assessment by the accounting team: The Accounts Team are immediately notified of the manager's approval and they can now audit the entry, fill in their response, and wrap up the process.

Utility Management

A big portion of expenditure is spent on essential utilities like electricity, water, gas, etc which only gets worse when not regulated. Organizations managing a group of outlets suffer from significant hidden losses as their utility consumption is not standardized.

The Utility Tracker is a functional template that helps in recording and keeping a track of the daily usage of utilities consumed by a store or an outlet. It consists of the following three modules that enable you to stay on top of your game:

1. Electricity Log
2. Water Log
3. Gas Log

Employees can easily and systematically enter the utility consumption data each day, with visual proof of the meter readings. Depending on the date entered, the template automatically calculates the daily consumption. Importantly, each module acts as an independent log that captures data related to its specific utility.