The company running two Subway® franchise stores in Basingstoke, decided it needed to upgrade its food labelling system, which was creating bottlenecks and impacting customer service
The ageing printers the stores used previously, combined with laborious and poorly-integrated stock-rotation software, was a significant drain on staff time and often meant employees resorted to handwritten labels.
This was compromising the restaurant’s ability to comply with both government food safety regulations and Subway®’s own hygiene rules and Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) policies.
A business-critical process
The restaurants need to label all products at three different stages in the process. Each store serves around 300 customers a day, so hundreds of labels need to be created daily.
Labels need to be printed every time a product is removed from the freezer to defrost, then again when it has been prepped for consumption. Any cooked products require a further stage of labelling to indicate their four-hour shelf-life once they have been heated up.
Updating an arduous process
The in-built complexity of the labelling system meant that it was poorly designed, difficult for new staff to learn, and time-consuming even for experienced employees.
Whenever an employee wanted to create a new label or batch of labels, they had to look up a code in a database, which then needed to be manually typed into the printer, along with the person’s initials and the number of labels required. The printer then created the relevant labels based on an internally stored database.
The impact of this time-consuming approach on staff’s ability to focus on customer service was exacerbated by the poor reliability of the printer, which would frequently fail, requiring staff to resort to hand-written labels – something that falls short of the brand’s high food-safety standards.
By upgrading to an app-based stock management system built by Navitas, staff in the stores now have a user-friendly image-based interface that allows the appropriate labels to be selected with a few taps of a tablet screen.
