Let's face it - as an industry our productivity sucks. I define
productivity as sales per labor hour. As we recently highlighted
during our 2008 People Report
Best Practices Conference, the graph below shows Food Service
productivity relative to the US overall and retail. For the last 10
years we have been outpaced by retail and the economy as a whole
and have flirted with zero to negative productivity growth three
times - and I won't even scare you with where we are at right
now.
The current economic conditions are forcing us to figure out new
ways to help our businesses survive and technology has to play a
key role in that if we hope to ensure our companies will not only
survive but thrive on the flip side of this downturn. Hiding out in
the assumption of "we are a labor intensive industry" will get us
no where - fast. Recently Microsoft's Business Division unveiled
their vision of the future and guess what? The "future" is not that
far away; its 2019 and while Microsoft may not be the darling that
Apple is currently, their vision is pretty impressive, check it
out.
So what's the future vision for the Food Service industry
that will make our restaurant employees more productive and your
customer experience more engaging? Grocery added self check out to
create efficiency and RFID tags are going help retail continue
their productivity growth.
Food Service clearly needs to create its future vision because
our direct competitors for employees are already working on it -
check out Banking:
And Retail and Grocery - our direct competitors for not
just employees, but sometimes consumers is really working on it -
check it out.
Your company needs a future vision for both customer and
employee facing technologies and clearly there are companies out
there carrying the torch for our industry. Take a look a list
of recommended links on the left of this page there are some
great technology partners listed and here are a couple
quick examples:
ESP -
Impacting both employee productivity and the customer
experience
HotSchedules- Save your
managers time, make your hourly employees lives easier to manager,
and manage your labor costs. They even have an iPhone
app.
What's your company going to do in the face of an
accelerating productivity crisis? What is your company's future
vision for technology and what technologies will you invest in?
Remember the digital revolution has just begun - we are only at Web
2.0 there are many more versions to come. Microsoft's vision of
2019 sets a new framework for how we need to be thinking about ways
that we can confront the operational pressures of productivity
gains and ensure our restaurants are sustainable and
profitable.