Restaurant User Story
Being a restaurant owner or operator is an overwhelming job, especially when managing multiple locations. Between overseeing staff, taking care of back of house tasks, and ensuring exceptional customer service, there is no room for error or mishaps. The restaurant business is costly, and all I receive in the mail is bills, bills, and more bills. One day, I walked into my office and opened one of the many envelopes that were sitting on my desk. In it was my monthly energy bill. Before my eyes was a string of numbers, much higher than I was expecting. Where is this high energy cost coming from? It seems like the number is getting higher every month and I don’t know what is the cause behind it.
3 months ago, I came to work to find that one of our walk-in freezers had stopped working. This particular freezer was where we stored all of our meats and seafood. Unfortunately, we discovered this issue only after the product was fully defrosted and outside of safe holding temperatures, which we then, of course, had to discard. What was frustrating was that we could have avoided this loss if we were utilizing a monitoring system that sent out notifications of equipment malfunctions.
When overseeing multiple locations, there are a number of issues all happening at the same time. Typically, we are in a reactionary mode and deal with issues as they come along. This leaves me with little time to focus on other steps that I could be taking to grow my business. Recently, I have been utilizing an IoT platform that provides predictive insights into our restaurants. The system provides my team with real-time notifications should any critical issues arise at specific locations or equipment within those locations. I very much enjoy that I can access my restaurants from my phone or tablet at any time and from anywhere.
The company now providing me with this service is called Energybox and the systems currently in place at my restaurants are SiteHero™ and EnergyTracker™. These solutions provide me with access to all of my locations on one platform. I don’t have to be at one of my locations to manage my operations. I can trust staff to take care of any issues with the tiered notification system. Access to this new data means that I can retrieve reports for audit purposes or look into the data and spot trends if anything goes wrong.
Along with the temperature and equipment monitoring benefits, I have now been able to reduce my energy bill by about 7%. The system lets me know exactly where and how we are using our energy down to the day, hour, and individual equipment, across all of my restaurants.
Being a restaurant owner is not an easy job, especially with multiple locations. But, with IoT technology and Energybox solutions in my stores, my life is much simpler. I have the ability to run my operations smoothly and reduce any unnecessary costs.
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