As the two main cost centers at every restaurant, it’s important to continuously find new ways to innovate food and labor management. That is what the Briad Group® is doing, and in turn their innovation has led to optimized food and labor costs and increased profits across the organization.
The Briad Group is becoming one of the fastest growing restaurant and hospitality companies and possesses an impressive portfolio, which includes well known quick-service and casual dining brands, and is the owner of Zinburger Wine and Burger Bar. In 2009, after deciding it needed a better food and labor management solution than simple Excel spreadsheets, The Briad Group partnered with CrunchTime to increase operational efficiency and gain more granularity and control over processes at company headquarters and in its different concepts.
Innovating Food Cost Management
The Briad Group’s chief concern was reducing the variance between actual and theoretical food costs. By gaining real-time insights into these variances with CrunchTime’s Actual vs. Theoretical food cost variance report, users can identify how much inventory they used versus how much they should have used, which is critical at Zinburger.
“For each food item, the Actual to Theoretical variance should be within one point at Zinburger,” says Emily Whitney, CrunchTime Administrator for The Briad Group. “CrunchTime allows us to ask, ‘What did we do? How can we correct a variance that’s not true?’ This is one of the best tools in our arsenal.”
Companies like The Briad Group understand that increasingly complex recipes and evolving guest preferences create new operational challenges, which enhances the value of tools designed to solve them. For example, the ‘Simple Receipt’ functionality is used at several Zinburger locations to help separate local store purchases from scheduled orders. When a new recipe calls for a specialized product that is not supplied by primary vendors, Simple Receipt allows managers to make a local store purchase and maintain the integrity of their inventory data.
In order to ensure its innovation produces the best results, The Briad Group requires easily accessible data that can help ensure managers make the best possible decisions. Having a system that produces smart, actionable, real-time reporting helps with this endeavor.
“It’s not just variance, the CrunchTime reporting is extremely comprehensive,” Whitney says.
Innovating Scheduling with CrunchTime! TeamworX
The Briad Group identified employee scheduling as a major area of need for innovation. Ensuring the right people are in the right jobs in the right shifts – and doing so in a timely manner – can help restaurants save tremendously on labor costs. Today, CrunchTime’s TeamworX scheduling application is used for everyday staffing in all Zinburger restaurants.
Using their TeamworX app on their personal devices, each team member can engage with their managers and coworkers to update their availability, swap shifts, request time off, and pick up open shifts. This not only empowers employees, it mitigates the burden of costly scheduling inefficiencies.
“Rolling out TeamworX was a huge, but worthwhile undertaking,” says Whitney. “Now managers tell us scheduling takes a fraction of the time it once did. They can clearly see if someone is available or not. I can’t say enough of all the good things. We just love TeamworX.”
The Bottom Line
Restaurant operations can never be complacent. For starters, they have to keep up with dramatic changes brought on by off-premise ordering or menu innovation. Additionally, in an era where competition is tougher than ever and forces like high turnover and wage increases threaten every restaurant’s bottom line, restaurant innovation – and the cost optimization that comes with it – is a necessity.
With the right food and labor operations management platform, companies like The Briad Group and Zinburger can maintain a commitment to innovation that separates themselves from the field.
Click here to learn more about The Briad Group’s decade of operational innovation and the results they achieved.
Want to know more? Visit us to learn how to optimize food and labor costs and maximize profits in all your restaurants.
This post is sponsored by CrunchTime! Information Systems