Quality and safety audits are an essential part of the restaurant industry. Every restaurant brand must conduct audits regularly and take them seriously. Done correctly, audits can help operators identify and fix any quality and safety issues before they become costly, damaging liabilities. Insights from these audits can help operators make more informed, data-driven decisions to maximize their organization’s safety, quality, compliance, and successes.
For many years, restaurants used paper checklists and Excel spreadsheets to audit. While this approach was the industry norm, it wasn’t ideal. Operators were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data. The information wasn’t comprehensive and couldn’t provide a holistic view across the entire organization. There was no way to accurately compile and analyze data sets, and operators were unable to spot trends or patterns to make any necessary adjustments. Processes were inconsistent across the industry – and from location to location within the same organization. In short, using manual systems made the auditing process cumbersome, time-intensive, error-prone, and inefficient.
Luckily, today’s tech advances are improving the way we audit, making the process significantly more accurate, transparent, holistic, and efficient. Tech solutions make it easier to collect, compile, and analyze data – even complex information from multi-unit brands – to gather valuable insights, pinpoint issues, and identify possible threats. Collecting and analyzing real-time data allows operators to make more informed decisions to improve key performance indicators (KPIs), like optimizing operations, maximizing safety and quality, increasing productivity, boosting revenue, and driving restaurant growth.
Some of the key technologies that are revolutionizing the way food brands audit include:
- SaaS-based quality management software. Quality management software offers benefits that operators won’t get using paper methods, including real-time data analysis, error reduction, flexibility, scalability, increased collaboration, and greater transparency. SaaS-based software streamlines the auditing process, providing a broad view of an entire organization and/or drilling down by location. This allows brand leaders to observe what’s happening across an enterprise, as well as in each specific unit. SaaS software provides real-time data, which operators can’t get from manual systems. This helps brand leaders make more informed decisions to maximize safety, quality, and compliance throughout their organization.
- The cloud. Paper records make it difficult (or impossible) to collaborate, especially for larger, multi-unit brands. The cloud allows your brand to centrally store information for a single source of truth, allowing your employees to access the most updated data from anywhere at any time. Teams can work together from different locations, streamlining the process and making it faster, easier, and more accurate to manage (and interpret) data. Technologies like the cloud reduce the time, money, errors, and headaches that were common with manual auditing processes. And the cloud’s security features, like two-factor authentication, data encryption, and role-based access levels, will protect even the most sensitive data.
- AI and machine learning. Artificial intelligence can expertly manage and analyze even large quantities of data in a way that can’t be done with manual systems. Brands can use AI to dig deeper into the data to reveal more about their company, its risks, and more. Using AI and machine learning for audits provides access to richer, more detailed information and valuable insights about what’s working well and what needs to be adjusted to increase safety and compliance. Moving forward, more auditors and brands will rely on AI to analyze data, identify trends, and determine risks and opportunities.