With 6 months left to go until our 5th anniversary, it seems like all my project that I have been working for the past few years are coming together all at once. Last week we finally got our walk-in freezer installed and I was able to pull three other freezers out of our kitchen. This allowed me to redesign how everything flows. I bought new equipment for the front sandwich line, so we can now do all of out sandwich, salad, and soup delivery all in one place. In the past if someone ordered a sandwich and a salad, someone would have to run to the kitchen in the back to make a salad. This should really help with our efficiency. I also added a second cashier station to the front to make entering orders faster. We still have a couple of pieces of equipment to get before we start doing daily breakfast, but we are almost there.
With all these changes, I am hoping we can improve our speed dramatically. In the four years that I have been here I have hardly ever had a complaint about quality. I don't receive many complaints, but when I do, they are about how long it takes to get served. One of our biggest problems has been whenever there is a line at the front, we only had one register to enter an order. Even if I had three people behind the counter, often there was at least one person just waiting to do something because the cashier was the bottleneck. Now someone can jump in on the second register and help bring the line down. Another issue has always been call in orders. If someone was taking a long order for pickup or delivery, customers in line would have to wait for them to finish. One of the other things we have add is a time clock at the sandwich line. Now every ticket will have a timestamp of when the order was placed and when it was taken out to the customer. This will give me good metrics to work with as we continue to bring our efficiency up.
We are so close to having all of our plans come together and it is really exciting. With two week until Heritage Festival, I am trying to get everything setup, so we can really see how well we do. Heritage Festival is our busiest weekend of the year, so I get to see how things flow under maximum load. The faster we become, the more business we will do.
