How To Know If Your Restaurant Facility Management Is Efficient or Not

To ensure the success of your business, you need to know the key performance indicators, so that you can know whether you are meeting them. When you engage a restaurant facility management company, you want to know for sure that it is helping you meet your goals. You want to increase efficiency, which means keeping your restaurant business at peak performance all the time.

But how can you know whether your restaurant facility manager is delivering value for your money? Keep reading to find out!

Customer satisfaction – Is it high or low?

Your business, or any other business for that matter, is customer-centric. Therefore, when you enlist facility management services, you want to see improved customer satisfaction. For instance, if you have outsourced parking facility management, you want customers to efficiently find space, know their cars are safe, and find everything orderly after dining at the restaurant.

To know whether the customers’ needs are being met efficiently, you should ask them to leave reviews. These will show you whether the facility management is working, or whether something needs to be looked into.

Collect customer feedback about everything so that you can know what tenets of your business need improvement.

The feedback should help you to know whether you need to improve facilities like the bar, private dining, washrooms, parking, kitchen, and many more.

Equipment performance – working or flailing?

The modern restaurant business runs on so advanced equipment that require specialized care and maintenance.

This is why businesses outsource the sourcing, installation and management of equipment such as coolers, freezers, grease interceptors, cooking appliances, HVAC, and others.

Equipment performance can be hindered by frequent breakdowns, but not when you have a good facility management company in place.

Some of the things that can help you to know how your restaurant equipment is performing include the number of replacements that have been done in the past year or so, the number of unplanned repairs, and how many failures there have been in a given time.  

The fewer, the better!

Good facility management ensures that possible problems with equipment are thought out in advance, and preventive measures put in place.

Proactive repairs are better than reactive repairs, as they can mean fewer breakdowns in between. If you have had zero-to-few equipment breakdowns across your entire chain of restaurants, you will know that your facility management company is meeting its objectives.

How long it takes to complete the facility maintenance jobs

You need to understand how long the facility maintenance jobs such as equipment maintenance and repairs take, and how much they cost your business. If they take too long to complete, and they cost too much money, it is an indication that your facility maintenance company is not efficient.

To know how long the maintenance jobs take to complete, take the number of days it took to complete all the work orders, and divide it by the number of work orders. That should give you a general idea of how good the maintenance company is.

You also need to categorize the jobs by their respective characteristics. For instance, you can find out how many jobs were completed over the budget, how many were completed on time, and whether the billing was accurate.

The company offering the restaurant management service should work in such a way that they minimize disruptions to the operations. This can show you how keen the company is to keep disruptions to the minimum. For instance, regular grease interceptor cleaning ensures your restaurant stays compliant, keep the plumbing working all the time, and prevents downtimes.

The company should also keep good reports of all the maintenance jobs they do. Such reports will help you to gauge whether it is time to replace some of the equipment.

An efficient facility manager also finds ways to streamline operations, make your equipment more efficient, and reduce your operational costs.

Employee retention or turnover rate

Employee retention or turnover rate are clear indicators of how happy your employees are to work in the facilities. If there is a high turnover rate in the kitchen, it means the facility is not being managed well, or that the employees are unhappy with a certain factor.

The facility manager should keep a report of the employee turnover rate and make it available to you all the time. To calculate the rate, just divide the number of employees separated by the total number of employees, and then multiply by a hundred. This should give you the percentage, and the lower, the better.

Perhaps the employees are not getting proper training and induction, hence their lack of satisfaction in the job place. The numbers you get should be compared against the rest of your restaurant chain. It will give you insights on how to improve workplace satisfaction.

Check the utility costs

The main objective behind hiring a facility manager is to make your restaurant chain more efficient in every way possible.

There is an efficient way to measure the utility costs. It is recommended that you measure the cost in square meters or square feet. That should give you an insight on the power and water usage in your business, and you will know where the money is going.

The facility manager should make changes that save money, such as:

•  Swapping the outdoor electrical lighting with solar lighting
• Using LED lights indoors
•  Installing water-efficient toilets
• Installing sensors that can turn off the air conditioners, or lights when the room is not being used

Is reactive maintenance superseding planned maintenance?

Planned maintenance is scheduled work that is intended to keep the equipment working. However, even with the best intention, there will still be breakdowns from time to time. What we are saying is that they should not be too many, since the preventive maintenance is supposed to prevent that.

You can know whether your facility manager is efficient when the planned maintenance is more than the reactive maintenance.

If you start noticing a trend leading to more reactive maintenance, it means there is a problem. Every time reactive maintenance is going on, it means there is a downtime somewhere.

Conclusion

It takes quite a lot to keep a restaurant business running efficiently all the time. To make this load lighter, it is better to work with a facility management company that can give you a sound restaurant plan.

Also, you should outsource as many services as possible to leave everything to experts. Besides, this is cheaper than having an onsite team for every aspect of your business.

Call us today on 855-519-5550 to consult on facility management solutions like grease trap cleaning and servicing, used cooking oil collection, and many more.