Tools for improvement
With more than 5,000 employees nationwide, Sirois knows that good communication and technology are critical to improving the company’s operational execution.
The company implemented a Web-based system to streamline and foster the exchange of information among corporate, franchisees and employees. The intranet improves the reporting of sales results and makes sure that everyone is getting the same unified message. It allows Checkers/Rally’s to communicate with its employees instantaneously and ensures that information such as promotional and training materials are up-to-date and sent out on time.
“People are able, via that Web site, to ask questions of our training department about materials or if it wasn’t clear to them what we’re talking about,” says Sirois. “It’s usually within 24 hours they get an answer to their question. And that question stays posted up for everybody else in the system, so if one person asked a question that 100 people had, they get the answer, too.”
The company has also spent the past few years upgrading Point of Sale (POS) systems in each of the restaurants.
“It’s very easy for folks to utilize these pieces of equipment,” says Sirois. “When they step up to a touch screen piece of technology, they understand it almost immediately. What that allowed us to do is shorten the time it takes to teach a cashier, for example, how to take orders and ring up things. If I can teach people quicker, that … shortens the cost of training.”
The new POS system also enables the company to put prompts on the register screens so that employees don’t have to rely on memory to remember to ask if a customer would like fries or suggest adding cheese to a burger.
“All those little slices of cheese add up,” says Sirois. “And by the way, the consumer who forgets to say, ‘I wanted the cheeseburger’ is glad you told them.”
The company has also added timing systems at each restaurant’s two drive-thrus.
“There’s a little digital readout so that not only does each side of the restaurant see what their current time is on that customer, but they see what their average time is so far for that meal period, and they can compete back and forth, which helps improve the speed,” says Sirois.
