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In a restaurant, half of the magic happens behind the scenes. Back-of-house staff are responsible for many of the tasks that ensure the smooth functioning of your business. But if your back of house relies on handwritten tickets and manual processes or lacks training or the technology they need, you risk falling behind and compromising the customer experience, which ultimately hurts your bottom line.
Step up your back of house operations to improve efficiency, quality, and reliability, and you can deliver high-quality food, control costs, and ensure compliance with health and safety regulations. It all leads to more customer satisfaction and more revenue.
Ready to make some changes? Use these five tips to enhance your back-of-house operations and streamline your kitchen workflow.
1. Assess the Current Situation
Before diving into changes, step back and watch your kitchen in action. Specifically look at flow. Are there tasks that take longer or require more steps than necessary? See if there are any obvious bottlenecks, which often happen at food prep stations, cooking stations, or during dishwashing. Look for roadblocks that keep your staff from doing their jobs efficiently, like outdated equipment, lack of training, or inadequate staffing during peak hours.
Once you know what’s slowing you down, you can target improvements that will make the most impact on operations and efficiency.
2. Connect Your POS to a Kitchen Display System
A kitchen display system (KDS) is an interactive solution to help back-of-house staff manage orders digitally. The system integrates with your POS and streamlines communication between the front-of-house and back-of-house staff. A KDS helps improve order accuracy and saves time in the kitchen — instead of moving printed tickets around the kitchen, staff are more focused on managing orders efficiently.
You know that effective communication is the key to a well-coordinated kitchen. Since a KDS system connects with orders from your point-of-sale (POS) system in real time, it eliminates the need for that expensive printer, and more importantly, fuels efficiency in your kitchen. And with a tableside POS system, servers can add orders directly into the system while still at the table, further streamlining the process. The addition of the KDS means real-time order updates — from notifying servers when a dish is ready to texting guests when their order is available for pick up — and increased accuracy and speed at every step.
3. Automate Notifications for Online Orders
Online ordering has grown 300% faster than dine-in since 2014, and now accounts for 40% of total restaurant sales. With that kind of order volume, kitchen staff needs an efficient system for accepting and tracking online orders.
By integrating your KDS with online and delivery orders, you can ensure that they seamlessly enter your kitchen queue. That allows back-of-house staff to manage orders accurately, optimizing workload and boosting guest satisfaction.
4. Generate Data-Driven Insights
What gets ordered in your restaurant, how much, and when can be useful — and revenue-generating — information if you know how to take advantage of it. With a KDS, restaurants can get insights into which orders take the longest to get out of the kitchen, as well as daily sales, menu item popularity, overall restaurant performance, and more. Armed with this information, you can make changes and enhancements from the front of house to the back to optimize operations, better understand staff performance, and increase revenue.
5. Stay Nimble
You know that things can shift quickly, and a calm evening can turn to chaos in the blink of an eye. By taking an objective look at your current kitchen workflows and maximizing technology and data, your back of house operations will become more efficient, reliable, and able to deliver the quality that drives customer satisfaction and revenue.
Learn more about RPOWER’s KDS and how it can streamline your restaurant’s operations. Ready to see what it can do to help your restaurant? Get in touch.