As restaurant operators battle the labor shortage, operational efficiency is more important than ever before. With fewer people on hand to run the business and keep customers happy, the pressure on employees to be efficient and productive has only increased. Higher employee turnover can also lead to a loss of institutional knowledge if operators don’t take the right precautions.
Without seasoned teams in the field, how can multi-unit operators help guarantee cost-saving measures are taken? It can be hard to understand exactly what is happening in each location.
Utilities are a significant cost, even under normal circumstances. The HVAC system, restaurant appliances, equipment, and lighting all contribute to ballooning energy bills. In a labor crunch, it becomes even more critical to control energy usage.
“Unfortunately, with higher turnover, the behavior of the employees can sometimes increase costs and waste energy,” says Bryant Bilal, senior offering manager at Honeywell. “It can be easy to forget to turn off lights or adjust the thermostat at the end of the day, for example.”
One solution to this thorny problem is to use smart building technology. Building management software, like the Honeywell Small and Medium Building Administrator powered by Honeywell Forge, allows restaurant operators to monitor and track energy usage across all their buildings from a single dashboard. User friendly and secure, operators can access this dashboard from anywhere with an internet connection. They can also set up custom alerts to get notified immediately if something falls out of designated parameters. The technology gives operators transparency into each of their buildings.
“You can’t change what you can’t see,” Bilal says. “It’s important to get smart devices into your facility so you can see what is happening and compare month-over-month and year-over-year activity. Then you can make informed decisions on how to lower costs and make the building more efficient.”
Honeywell tracks a wide range of data points to help operators save on costs, from temperature setpoints and lighting schedules to equipment usage monitoring. Operators can compare the information gathered from their units against benchmarks, or even against other buildings in their portfolio.
Operators can also use the system to better understand other aspects of their operations, such as keeping tabs on maintenance issues. In addition to managing energy costs, Honeywell reports that the platform can reduce service calls up to 30 percent. Its alerting system can also help prevent inventory spoilage and resolve equipment problems quickly and remotely.
“Some customers have saved thousands of dollars in inventory because of an alarm that indicated the refrigerator or freezer was out of the proper temperature range,” Bilal says. “To give a recent example, our managed services team (which can monitor the system for you) saw an alarm, alerted the customer, and was able to get the proper technician out to repair the refrigerator before the inventory was lost. Without affordable building management systems like ours, many customers have no other cost-effective option. They could arrive to a location with a freezer full of melted ice cream.”
Honeywell’s solution is designed to help managers of small- and medium-sized buildings—like restaurants—gain more control over the sustainability and profitability of their holdings.
“The most important part of the quick-service business is uptime—staying open and in business to keep customers happy,” Bilal says. “Operators can get our system installed with minimum disruption. After it’s installed, they can better serve their customers with less worries about their restaurant’s operations with a system that closely monitors the HVAC, fans, and refrigerators while also potentially avoiding unnecessarily closures for maintenance or some catastrophic equipment failure. Our system gives the ability to prevent those surprise failures and keep the doors open when they should be.”
For more on remotely monitoring your buildings, visit the Honeywell website.
By Kara Phelps
