In a modern restaurant chain, maintaining restaurant and supplier compliance, managing product specifications, completing audits, and coordinating a staff with incredibly high turnover rates makes the role of QA Director extremely challenging. Fortunately, there is technology available to assist and enable you to manage more effectively than ever before. The best part? All you need is an internet connection.
Consumers Demand
Restaurants must adapt to the realities of the increasingly high demands placed on them by consumers. These concerns highlight the newly emerging requirement of transparency in the food supply chain.
That industry pressure was underscored in 2015 when popular "fast casual" restaurants began emphasizing "freshness" over “fastness.” Food chains were compelled not only to compete "freshness-against-freshness," but also to transparently document the processes that their fresh foods followed from origin to table. A 2015 white paper issued jointly by Technomic and Deloitte & Touche (D&T) reported that changing consumer preferences for "fresh” food - locally sourced, organic, natural and sustainable products - was changing the food industry game.
Technology Evolves
In addition, the same D&T paper noted that companies gain a decided industry advantage when they adopt technologies that enhance their performance and execution capacities to respond accurately to consumer demands. The paper suggested how some types of technology could help the global food supply chain respond to the new challenges:
- Visibility enhancement
- Mobile devices make it increasingly easy to track and document each food item from its source through each step of the supply chain.
- Analytics
- Modeling allows balancing of costs to revenues as well as forecasting trends to ensure your products meet your strict specifications.
- Performance management
- Keeping suppliers accountable and on task keeps the food supply clean and cuts costs at the restaurant level.
Actionable Quality Assurance (AQA) Delivers
AQA has engaged today's sophisticated supply chain and logistics technologies to respond to the evolving demands of the global food supply chain. Proprietary software gives you the technological tools you need to avoid the painful lessons of other restaurateurs while focusing on the future envisioned by the industry professionals at D&T and Technomic.
AQA's intuitive dashboards help drive your organization's focus to prioritize its attention to critical KPIs:
- You see your enterprise-wide data organically, through a single screen, giving it full transparency within your business and industry auditors;
- The entire mass of your data is available to you, revealing insights previously hidden in siloed software programming;
- Drill down charts and alerts clearly show the details of events and processes;
- Automated workflows capture the data of your suppliers, restaurants, auditors and testing labs;
- Alerts to arising issues let you "manage by exception" - the software draws your attention to where it's needed most.
Perhaps most importantly, AQA's easy-to-use, cloud-based programming is mobile ready and launches straight from your device with no capital investment required. So, if you manage a restaurant chain’s food safety and quality, would like to improve standards and save time and money, contact AQA today.
