How To Improve Your Restaurant Operations

February 8, 2021

Owning a restaurant requires a mix of delicious food and drinks, reliable service, and efficiency in your operations. Hitting the right balance is an ongoing challenge for the restaurant industry. As a restaurant owner yourself, you may be confused about how to achieve it all. The good news is it’s possible. There are ways to improve operations in your restaurant and achieve the profits you need.

If you're looking for tips on how to improve your restaurant service and overall performance, keep reading to learn how to improve your operations in ways that lead to healthier profits and growth.

Operational efficiency is key

You may have delicious menu items and beautiful facilities, but profits are often thin in the restaurant industry. This means you will need to do everything you can to improve your results. The logical question is “How can I make my restaurant better?” The chief way is with efficiency. Without tight control over incoming and outgoing costs and ways of bringing in money faster, even a restaurant with a delicious menu will suffer. Maintaining strong efficiency is vital in your business segment.

There are seven key ways your restaurant can keep your costs under control and maximize the revenue you bring in; check them out.

Best ways to improve restaurant efficiency

#1 A Strong Training Program

Employee turnaround is often high in the restaurant industry. Ensuring new staff performs their duties correctly and has full knowledge of ordering and menu items ensures seamless customer service. It also provides significant cost-savings, and efficiency standards are being upheld. Concrete training and procedures show you which procedures work and which need improvement.

#2 Embrace New Technology

Today’s POS technology is focused on making the processes of ordering, food prep, and management easier, more streamlined, and more accurate. And they do it all instantly, freeing up time for your staff to concentrate on other matters at hand, such as improving in-person customer service and the overall customer experience. Here at BNG-POS, we offer restaurant POS systems specifically designed to make everyone’s job easier. From front registers to online ordering, mobile ordering devices, kitchen systems, and back-end management systems, you get everything you need to make each job more manageable.

#3 Fast And Correct Ordering And Payments

Today’s systems offer faster and more reliable ordering and payments via mobile devices with intuitive interfaces. Today’s ordering technology is easy for employees to learn and allow for more features such as instant tips, order splitting, and payment right at the table, each element resulting in faster orders and quicker table turnaround.

We even offer table-side ordering that allows customers to place orders themselves. With easy-to-use interfaces and clear read-outs that don’t confuse customers, you benefit from direct-to-kitchen ordering and instant payments.

#4 Faster Ordering For Recurring Customers

If your business has customers who order “the usual,” you can order menu items exactly how they like it, no matter who the server is at the time. Today’s POS technology can log customer favorites, including “dressing on the side” and substitutions. No more staff questions, no more awkward situations with customers, and no more order change approvals from management. Your customers get the food the way they like it every time while seeing their business is appreciated.

#5 Improve Deliveries

How can restaurants improve service delivery? The trick to deliveries is ensuring food is ready on time and delivered smoothly. Delivery teams will be able to drop off food faster and ensure your kitchen doesn’t get overloaded. To do this, here are some tricks:

  • Online ordering allows customers to place their orders themselves, reducing ordering delays from incorrect orders by your staff while putting your customer’s responsibilities to order correctly. And with orders being fed directly to the kitchen, the cooking staff can start cooking immediately without delay, resulting in faster income for you.
  • Customers or delivery staff can get estimated and actual completion times, including forecasts of order delays during busy days and times, helping you meet their expectations. As orders are being completed, delivery or pick-up contacts are informed with tighter windows and actual completion times to ensure prompt pickup, allowing room in the kitchen for new orders to be prepared and picked up, speeding up the cooking and delivery process.

As a POS provider, we include these delivery additions to your POS capabilities often, helping you increase efficiency in order completion and speed.

#6 Reduce Food Waste

Food waste comes in two forms: giveaways to staff and customers and inefficient kitchen performance. There are strategies to fix both.

Food cards for employees help track all orders and block open doors to untracked food preparation. Combined with tight stock tracking, these cards put all kitchen activities in a format you can analyze, adjust, and improve when needed. Having your kitchen staff responsible for logging food further prevents food and drink giveaways to employees and customers by making your kitchen staff liable for any losses.

#7 Brainstorming

With more time saved through today’s POS systems, you have more time to work alongside your kitchen and wait for staff to implement strategies that improve menu items, order flow, customer service, and customer experience. Your staff is on the front lines of these important segments of your business, so it’s important to brainstorm with your employees to improve the way work is done.

With so much back-end operation now happening digitally, you can most likely provide what your staff needs more easily through today’s systems. Listen to what they suggest. We may have the tools to make it happen.

It is also essential to schedule time to improve each area of your business regularly and consistently. Allow for informal and formal meetings during set days of the week or month to cover all business areas and keep the conversations flowing. Adhere to the times to ensure staff who aren’t working that day know when they need to be there and ensure no one’s time is wasted waiting for employees to arrive.

Including your staff in the process keeps them aware of issues, opportunities and includes them in successes, boosting comradery.

Conclusion

These tips for intelligent planning and strategizing help you keep a tighter track of what works and what doesn’t. Today’s POS technologies are a huge asset to any restaurant; from robust software to aid with inputting orders at faster rates, as well as more accurate ordering, your team has more ways to succeed at running your business smoothly.

When you are ready to upgrade to today’s POS offerings, BNG POS is here to help. We can provide all the needed hardware and software and may be able to adapt today’s POS technology into systems you already own. Contact us to find out more.

(C) 2024 BNG Technologies. All rights reserved.