Every franchise group manager has an “efficiency” goal: How do you run locations better, maintain great food, and happy employees while doing more with less?
For Matt Hansen, senior vice president of operations at KBP Foods, adding an automated oil-management system was the answer.
KBP owns 163 KFC restaurants across the U.S. Each location had a basic system to monitor oil usage, but managers didn’t have access to centralized reporting, oil-usage monitoring over time, or data to help use oil more efficiently.
To remedy this situation, Hansen decided to install the automated oil-management system from Restaurant Technologies, Inc. (RTI). Since then, all of KBP’s KFC locations have been upgraded, with the newly purchased Virginia locations being the most recent.
The patented RTI closed-loop oil-management solution automates fresh oil delivery, storage, handling, and disposal of used oil.
Employees use a wand to fill and discard oil in the fryer. RTI technicians supply fresh oil and collect the used oil via a secure fill box mounted to the exterior of each restaurant, eliminating the need for “grease caddies” and other antiquated oil-handling practices.
RTI also provides a full training program, in which the employees and managers of each store receive in-depth coaching on the system from RTI personnel.
For Hansen, the best feature is the Total Oil Management (TOM) online portal. Using TOM, managers can monitor oil-related data for single or multiple restaurant locations, analyzing oil quality, usage, and other statistics.
Managers have visibility into employee compliance with standard operating procedures and oil data, including the volume of oil used at any given time.
“It’s a brilliant way of measuring efficiency and ensuring we provide our highest-quality food,” Hansen says. “If our oil usage is too high, we’re wasting money. If it’s too low, we’re probably serving a product not up to our standards. TOM automatically computes all of these numbers in every store for us. Essentially, the system pays for itself.”
“We can now maximize our oil usage, getting the most out of it without wasting or overusing it,” he continues. “This has the potential to offer significant savings because behind chicken, cooking oil is where we spend the most money.”
Hansen also knows that implementing the RTI system has helped make KFC general manager jobs easier. Aside from eliminating grease caddies and creating a cleaner atmosphere, managers like having access to more robust data, training tools, and reports.
“When KBP Foods walks into a room of general managers and says we’re going to put RTI into their restaurants, we get a standing ovation,” Hansen says. “It’s that important and that impactful.”
