Time and Quality: Measuring Your Speed of Service

It’s Tuesday night, and Hank’s had a long day. A veteran of the restaurant business, he’s lived through those shifts that swamp the kitchen. Tonight was fairly busy. Steady, he would say. With the lights turned off, the doors locked, and the air quiet, Hank runs one last check. In his back office, he logs into the ConnectSmart® Kitchen Enterprise portal and pulls up his restaurant speed of service data for the day. From the report, he notes the entree counts for the evening. “Somewhat busy for a Tuesday, but nothing record-breaking,” he thinks to himself.   He sees the stream of orders that came in from off-site as well as from within, paying particular attention to their relatively even split. He decides to get a bit more granular and isolates a single burger in the report. Moving from left to right, column by column, imagining the stations in his kitchen as he does it, he sees precisely when the customer placed the order, and when the burger started cooking. He can see, from the report, that their average burger cook time is 8 minutes. This one finished well within the threshold. Restaurant analytics tell him when the staff plated the burger and the narrow time frame it sat underneath a heat lamp in the delivery window. To his relief, it waited a mere 90 seconds before getting to the table—a triumph for his kitchen who’ve set a site goal (and customized it in CSK) for no order to exceed 2 minutes from plating to table. Hank smiles, knowing he’s making much better ticket times and marked increases in customer satisfaction. Moreover, he marvels that he can see these upswings reflected in the data, without being physically present in the kitchen. He understands his restaurant data, down to the minute, so he can improve speed of service. He closes the report and switches off his computer monitor, not-so-longingly reminiscing on the days of grease pencils and notepads. By using CSK, the best-in-class kitchen display system, Hank runs a fully integrated kitchen backed by software and automation. It generates useful and digestible data, reflected and updated in real time. Hank makes informed decisions with confidence knowing that with CSK, he’s got a smart solution on his side.  Subscribe to the blog for more interesting restaurant content!

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About the Author

Dylan Chadwick is a Content Marketing Specialist at QSR Automations. He graduated from Brigham Young University with an English degree and journalism focus and loves to write about technology. When left to his own devices, he enjoys loud music, adorable dogs and documentaries about the aforementioned.