The future is here: Dynamic production in QSRs

1. Why dynamic production in QSRs?

Production planning is one of the essential functions in QSR operations. It ensures that restaurants can meet customers with the highest quality/freshest product, optimal to their brand standard, and simplifies the cook’s job by providing timely and accurate information on what needs to be produced to deliver the best quality product. Checking forecast and inventory stocks, arranging ingredients, and ensuring the food is cooked correctly are just a few of the challenges production planning solves.

Dynamic production leverages data to update production schedules in real-time to achieve new levels of efficiencies and cost savings while ensuring consistency of product quality.

2. What recent trends have you seen in dynamic production in QSRs?

QSRs continue to evolve, and Dynamic Production is key in ensuring that they provide quick service but also fresh quality products to the consumer. The Production tool allows a QRS to ensure they have a product for the projected customer and assists with limiting the waste and lowering the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). Global trends are showing that with the daily cost of living going up, people are focusing on good quality food at a reasonable price which drives more sales for QSRs initially, but if the quality is not maintained, that demand will move to another quick service provider. Dynamic Production helps QSR make this a reality.

3. Are there any specific challenges that come with implementing dynamic production in a QSR setting?

One of the challenges we hear from our customers rolling out of dynamic production is finding efficient hardware including touchscreen devices to manage the solution. In addition, restaurants and operations are not spending enough time understanding requirements for mounting devices to ensure convenience for operations, and review of best practices to facilitate unobstructed access to these devices.

The Point-of-sale needs to integrate with Fourths solutions to ensure the required data is provided in near-real-time to achieve the functionality required by Dynamic Production.

A BOH (back of house) Tool can forecast but it is key that the real-life data flows through to keep the Dynamic Production at its peak. That is why working with an experienced solutions provider like Fourth is essential to long-term profitability.

4. How is Fourth responding to these challenges? Do you think that there is a danger of restaurants becoming too reliant on dynamic production?

As a software vendor, we do not dictate any specific hardware, therefore we engineered dynamic production to be hardware agnostic, where it would work on any touch screen device with adequate screen size and a modern web browser. We are also working on simplifying the use of the system, for example, the ability to log into the system using a pin code, or support of multiple devices in the cooking area reflecting ingredients associated with different stations, such as proteins or sides.

5. Talk a little more about Fourth’s solution and its benefits?
   

Fourth’s Dynamic Production planning software, part of MacromatiX, improves operational efficiency and cost control while also helping restaurants ensure they always serve their customers with the freshest ingredients. This is done by tracking optimum fresh time and hold time with dynamic in-store production guidance throughout the day while the system can warn staff when the ingredients no longer meet quality standards.

It also has production recommendations based on Fourth’s advanced forecasting engine, intelligent exception-based alerting, and over 25 production planning data points. This means you get optimised ordering, less waste, more sanitary food storage conditions, and fresher ingredients.

6. How do you think the industry will change over the next few years as more restaurants adopt dynamic production methods?

With the use of data and the development of technology, QSRs will have a better forecast to match customer demands through production planning. Practical, cost and time-efficient dispatch of food results in reduced waste and more systematic operational processes. Restaurants can also develop business strategies while providing a better dining experience for their customers.