Organizing the Chaos - How we Reduced our Planning Time by 80%
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
As covered earlier in this blog series, before starting Sous Chef, we had a catering company 2Forks.
Treacherous Growth
Over the years as we were growing 2Forks, we found opportunities to expand with different menus and cuisines. On any given day we could be running multiple dishes from multiple menus with each dish counts into the 1000’s. Needless to say, we had a lot of moving parts. If any part was missing or late it resulted in angry customers and a week of huge cost overruns. It was a phase of treacherous growth and we needed better organization.
Order to the chaos
Our first step was to institute a weekly meeting for our team to gather around an oversized spreadsheet printout containing our meals, their recipes, production steps, and develop a plan for the week. After spending hours meticulously filling in every cell, we felt like we had just summited Everest. It was a tremendous amount of work, but magical when it was complete. As the weeks continued on we were tormented by the thought of either going through the pain of planning every week or not planning at all, which would invite chaos to takeover. We had to come up with a way to make the process less painful.
Automating the chaos
When we figured out how to automate the process we all screamed out Hallelujah we reached the mountaintop. Well maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration but we were very excited and got to work creating template prep sheets for each station and broke them down by the day of the week. Those templates would then automatically populate with information from each week’s orders. Having 80% of the planning work done automatically, we were freed up to focus on the remaining 20% variability like changes to orders, staff calling out, batching production, and more. We quickly found that our labor costs decreased, our margins increased and we were able to produce even more meals every day.
This kind of automation is at the heart of SousChef.
Variety wins customers
As we grew even larger our customers expected even more variety in our menus. We quickly found that we needed to find a better way to develop new menu items. Read that story here.
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