The success of your pizzeria lives or dies with your operational design. If you have an inefficient operation, you’re doomed to consistently make costly mistakes that eat away at your profits. With the following tips, you can create a system that is seamless and makes the entire ordering, prep, and delivery experience as simple as possible.
1. Use Standardized Recipe Cards
In a restaurant, the smallest hitch can lead to a cascade of problems, and suddenly you’re dealing with a backlog of orders and losing money by the fistful. So the last thing you want is your cooks running all over the place, bumping into one another and disrupting other employees, while trying to complete an order. With the help of standardized recipe cards, you make food preparation as efficient as possible and turn out more consistent dishes for your guests.
With a detailed list of exact ingredient amounts and the order they are required, you can get a better idea of how these ingredients should be arranged on the make line. You know you’ve done it right if your food can be prepared like it is on an assembly line, minimizing travel back and forth through the kitchen area.
2. Set Up Opening and Closing Checklists
Do you have a readily available list of steps that employees have to follow when opening or closing the restaurant? If not, then you’re just asking for a more chaotic work environment. By putting together a laminated list of steps that someone needs to take to make the restaurant fully operational in the morning, and to properly power down everything at night, you can ensure that there are no hiccups when your first orders start to come in each day.
3. Get Integrated Inventory Tracking
Nothing is worse than getting ready for a lunch rush, only to find out that you are running low on an ingredient like green peppers or cheese. This can be disastrous for a pizzeria, especially if you have to 86 one of your most popular dishes.
If you have inventory tracking that is integrated with your POS, then you’ll know ahead of time when ingredient levels don’t match sales numbers. Integrated inventory software is able to compare item counts with real-time sales in order to indicate whether or not you have proper levels of each ingredient. Plus, if you ever run out of an ingredient, you can easily update your POS to ensure that no orders with that ingredient can be entered.
4. Switch to Integrated Bookkeeping Software
A large part of restaurant operations doesn’t take place in the kitchen or FOH. Bookkeeping is the perfect example of this, which accounts for 20 hours or more each month for many restaurateurs. When you are forced to go back through all of your sales and manually enter this information, it can drastically increase the amount of time you need to spend in the office.
With bookkeeping software integrated with your POS, all of your sales information is fed directly into your books, whether a payment was made via cash, EMV chip card, Apple Pay, or whatever other forms you accept.
5. Get More Comprehensive Driver Management
When you offer delivery, your operations can become a mess quite easily, due to the sheer number of moving pieces involved. If you want to get a handle on your operational efficiency, then a more comprehensive driver management system is the answer. Ideally, you should be able to give drivers directions to exactly where they are going, effectively bundle nearby deliveries together, and get accurate estimates on delivery and driver return times, all from one screen.
By integrating your bookkeeping, delivery management, and inventory reporting with your POS, you’ll notice a significant improvement in your restaurant’s operational flow. Once you make these five areas more organized, the rest of the pieces should begin to fall into place, giving you a properly organized business. If you’re interested in further improving your pizzeria’s operational organization, then check out our article on how kitchen displays are more efficient than printers.
