Running a Restaurant using the BSC design

Considering that ‘food’ is one of the basic needs for surviving, running a Restaurant quite expectedly offers a profitable business opportunity

However, operating a place like Restaurant is flanked by its own set of woes that can give jittery times to its owners. Customers are not ready to spend their time waiting for the order to be placed at their tables. Such a requirement to serve the visitors on ‘real-time’ basis demands perfect back ground coordination among the employees and tools. Drawing from this, exercising controls on issues like ‘stock turnover’ and ‘staff turnover’ occupy significant positions when one deals in the ‘food industry’. Both the ‘back-office’ and ‘front-end’ participants should be involved in the job of imparting a ‘pleasant fooding experience’ to the customers.

Any one of the ‘loads of concerns’ can send the prospective clients to knock at the competitor’s door. For instance, that the ‘manager interacted rudely to a group’ or that the ‘place was not clean or neat enough’ or even that the ‘other restaurant has more offers’ can compel them to opt for that ‘other place’.

Another entrant in the list of challenges is the task of ‘building and sustaining reputation. It is of utmost importance in this case as ‘reference visitors’ form a major chunk of the total customer base. This leaves ‘less room for errors and improvement’.

Competition in this industry is enough to give sleepless nights to the restaurateur and managers. A constant fight to better the processes and add to the list of services provided is sought by the survivors of this domain. Consequently, in addition to well-defined procedures for internal operations, one is required to develop a code of conduct to help out the employees for rendering clients the ‘expected level’ of service.

Yet another challenge involves negotiating ‘large variety’ of people who visit these places. This is a major determinant of the cuisines that are offered at the place.

One must also note that the financial motives are always there with the accounts demanding an infinite swelling in revenue and sales figures.

All these issues add up to make it mandatory for the operators to frame a ‘calculative approach and technique’ for tackling these problems. BSC comes to one’s rescue in this sense. One can identify the metrics to serve as the ‘guiding stick’. The perspectives that count when it comes to running a restaurant are- ‘Financial’, ‘Kitchen Management’, ‘Visitors’ Experience and Service’ and ‘Marketing and Sales’. The parameters for knowing the Financial success of the place are- ‘Wage costs:

Sales’, ‘annual revenue generated’, ‘percentage increase in per order or per customer revenue’, ‘net earnings rise’ and ‘per seat hour available revenue’. Further, Visitors’ experience and services perspective can be obtained using KPIs like ‘number of food or service quality complaints’, ‘frequency of visits by top 100 or 200 customers’, ‘reference customers raise’ and ‘drop in time-lag’. Next comes the Kitchen Management subject that can be handled by looking at values of indicators like ‘number of kitchen hours’, ‘costs of kitchen linen’, ‘stock turnover rate’ and ‘food cost borne on per head basis’. Lastly, Marketing and Sales aspect can be evaluated using metrics ‘response rate’, ‘percentage increase in the number of bookings on week-ends’, ‘press mentions’ and ‘sales query conversion rate’. By taking such ‘quantifiable steps’ offered by this tool, one can hand over the responsibility of shaping the business in ‘desired manner’ to this device.