How Can You Improve Restaurant Efficiency?

The good news for all the restaurant owners out there is that the restaurant failure rate has dropped over the last decade. The bad news is that about one-third of restaurants are still failing within two years.

If you’re in charge of running a restaurant right now, this should show you just how important it is to make your establishment as efficient as possible. If you don’t work to improve restaurant efficiency over time, it could very well result in your restaurant closing before long.

Fortunately, there are a handful of simple steps you can take to improve restaurant efficiency. They’ll also help improve your business efficiency as a whole. It should make it possible for you to keep your restaurant afloat for a lot longer than it would otherwise be.

Learn all about how you can give your restaurant’s efficiency a big boost below.

Hire the Right People to Work for Your Restaurant

You can open up a restaurant in the best location possible and serve the most delicious food in your entire area. But if you don’t have the right people working in your restaurant, it might all be for naught.

More specifically, you might struggle to improve restaurant efficiency when you have the wrong people in place within your business. You will want to spend your fair share of time establishing a set of hiring practices that’ll enable you to bring the right employees on board.

Everyone you hire for your restaurant should be qualified to do their jobs, including your:

• Managers
• Chefs
• Servers
• Hosts
• Busboys

You should be able to trust them to be efficient to increase your business productivity thanks to their efforts.

Train Your Restaurant’s Employees Accordingly

It isn’t enough to simply hire the right people to work for your restaurant. You’re also going to need to go through the process of training them so that they know how to handle themselves while at work in your restaurant. And you aren’t going to be able to get away with providing all your employees with the same type of training.

Your hosts, for example, will need to be trained to provide your patrons with the best customer service. Your managers, meanwhile, will need to be trained to look over your operation and report any potential problems directly to the top.

Providing your employees with the proper training will work wonders for you as you attempt to improve restaurant efficiency. You’ll be able to depend on your employees to do their jobs and do them well while they’re at work.

Set Up a Better System for Placing Orders in Your Restaurant

For a long time, many restaurants handled putting in orders with pens and paper. If you’re still doing this, you might want to think about creating a new system for placing orders that will be more efficient overall.

There are all kinds of great restaurant software that you can get your hands on these days so that you can set up the perfect system for placing orders. It’ll keep all your employees on the same page at all times. And it will prevent orders from slipping through the cracks like they so often can when you’re too reliant on an old-school ordering system.

You might even want to go as far as to set up something like these self-service table ordering systems for your restaurant. They can cut out the middle man and allow your customers to place orders themselves and get them directly to your chefs to improve kitchen efficiency.

Work to Keep Tabs on Your Restaurant’s Inventory

Inventory management is another thing that can have a big impact on your restaurant’s efficiency. If you’re still monitoring your inventory with a pen and paper, you can almost guarantee that your restaurant won’t be nearly as efficient as you would like it to be.

There is automated restaurant inventory management software you can use to keep up with where your inventory stands. You won’t need to be as concerned about running out of certain items when you have this type of software at your fingertips.

If your restaurant does a lot of catering, you might also want to explore the option of obtaining software that can help you keep tabs on future orders. This future order management software is a great example of this.

When you make this kind of software available to your employees, you won’t have to worry about your kitchen getting slammed by orders that could have been taken care of earlier. That alone will improve restaurant efficiency and keep your operation humming along.

Use the Latest Technology to Your Restaurant’s Advantage

We’ve already highlighted a few options that you’ll have if you want to invest in software that will help you with running a restaurant successfully. But there is also other technology that can benefit you in a big way when you incorporate it into your business.

Contactless smart food lockers, for instance, can completely change the way you get orders to your customers. Your customers will appreciate being able to retrieve orders from your restaurant without having to walk in, stand in line, wait for you to get their order for them, etc.

The more you learn how to embrace technology within your restaurant, the more efficient your establishment will become.

Improve Restaurant Efficiency by Utilizing These Tips

You might not be able to improve restaurant efficiency overnight. It’ll take some hard work on both your part and the part of your employees to see sweeping changes.

But as you’ve seen here, you can make your business more productive and efficient by following a few simple tips. Truffle can help you implement some of the changes we’ve discussed here. We can set you up with inventory management software, contactless smart food locks, and so much more.

Contact us now to see how our products can benefit you and your restaurant and make it more profitable than ever before.