How to Take & Work Orders Efficiently. In Your Restaurant, Bar Spain.
One of the secrets of running a successful Bar, Restaurant on the Costa del Sol is:
Train your staff to operate to a system.
Especially when it comes to taking down customers orders!
There is nothing worse for slowing down the flow rate from the customers table through the kitchen and finally back to the table, than a set of staff who have no common system for working/processing orders.
I worked for Ford Motor C0. when I was young. I was one of 14,000 staff. when I first arrived I couldn’t understand how the output of 14,000 office staff could be co-ordinated. Here’s how it’s achieved in a nut shell:
They have a massive office solely dedicated to writing systems/procedures. These people who ensure that 14,000 staff can operate together in a highly efficient way are called “Systems Analysts”.
To run a bar/restaurant successfully which employs staff, you must become your own Systems Analysts.
Here’s how we take and process orders to a strict system:
Any item on our menu is described in detail, so all staff must be taught the same system of short hand and must use it at all times when taking down orders
The short hand must be simple. The simpler the better!
e.g. Our short hand looks like this:
Cheeseburger with onions, chips and a side salad and a gin & tonic for table 4, would be written as follows:
4.
1* ch/b+ons+chips
1*sal green.
Everybody who works in my pizzeria uses this system.
The advantages are:
- Can be written quickly
- Can be read quickly. This is very important for the chef as he may have as many as 30 orders hanging on pins in front of him, at any one time. He can read them quickly and hold them in his memory easier.
- Don’t have to decipher several different ways that staff choose of writing down the same thing.
- No mistakes in what arrives at the customer’s table.
- Speeeds up the work flow
How do I find the Weak Spots in my Bar/restaurant in Spain?
Well most big businesses would call in a Business Analyst to assess how efficient their business is running.
You can’t afford the luxury, but you have all the same problems to solve as does a big business, if you are going to attract a big enough share of the market, minimise your costs, maximise your profits in order to grow your business.
On My Blog I will Show You How to Analyse Your Business
Remember the market is out there, so firstly identify you target market.
Mine is people who live here in Spain or are on holiday and want:
That’s my target market, so now I must do everything within my power to build a business that attracts the largest sector of this market possible.
- Aim to attract the target market
This is where all good businesses start.
So you need to look at your small business in the same way that a big business looks at itself.
Today We’ll look at staff efficiency.
1) Give all staff a written job description (If the rubbish has to be taken out 3 times per day, that is somebody’s job and must be included on their job description). The job description is vital in controlling staff and getting the Max. out of them. Many arguments just don’t happen when staff have their job description in writing.
2) Watch your staff for a week and make notes on how each member does their job. (If you are husband and wife running a business, with a small staff, you still need job your own job descriptions description). At the end of a week review each staff members input into the business and how well they have honoured their job description. Give both Praise and Criticism and get staff members to express how they feel about their job and how the business might be improved.
3) Germaine to the food and drink business are happy smiling staff members, who are chatty and polite to customers. Teach you staff that they are playing a role and that hardly anything a customer says should be taken personally.
4) The most important thing of all is to teach your staff that it is the customer who pays everybody’s wages and one should never be rude to a customer.
