Background
The food production industry is one of the most lucrative albeit saturated industries in South Africa. As a result, fast food outlets such as Hungry Lion are constantly seeking methods to improve efficiency and grow revenue as they grapple with challenges such as compliance, food hygiene, food safety, and managing deskless staff. Outlet managers often struggle to adequately train staff and measure staff performance and key performance indicators (KPIs). This, in turn, affects compliance, food hygiene and safety requirements, upkeep of restaurants and accountability.
Hungry Lion has been using Bloodhound’s Xactco paperless deskless workforce management solution and Observer platform since early 2018. It has been implemented at Hungry Lion stores across the countries that they trade in and offered increased flexibility, transparency, and productivity. Jonathan , Head of Insights, together with a small team of analysts, used business intelligence (BI) tools to analyse Hungry Lion’s Xactco data in order to manage the business more efficiently. Jonathan’s role was to furnish and facilitate data and metrics and visibility of information for the entire operations team.
Xactco and Observer customised to collect data
Collecting reliable data and providing accurate feedback are crucial components of performance management. Jonathan and his team started working on food cost models and successfully launched BI dashboards for the operations team. Part of that journey was obtaining validated data from Xactco and working with the Xactco team to get to a point where information was available at a granular level and could be integrated with BI tools. The goal was to ensure a uniform flow of data in the same repository. This empowered the operations teams to be able to make decisions based on fact rather than gut feel decisions.
Gathering data insights to empower operations team
Once the team better understood what the backend portal, Observer could do, Hungry Lion used Xactco to structure questions and apply conditional logic to their digital checklists. This meant that workflows could be set up to cater to in-store deviations in terms of which additional context, such as a clarifying comment or a photo supporting the data, could be requested. All that information combined with a thorough understanding of the value that this tool offered, became paramount in Hungry Lion’s journey with Xactco and their ultimate operational success. Jonathan explains:
“We were able to get to a point where we didn’t only have quantitative but also qualitative data. So instead of asking 30 questions in a checklist, we could now reduce the number of questions significantly by adding a conditional format to say if the answer is ‘no’, provide further details in the form of either a photo or a comment. That kind of utility in the Observer program was really powerful for us. Now we can, based on results, give somebody a generic instruction and get them to follow the process logic. All because of the flexibility of Xactco ”
On route to meeting long-term goals
The fast-food chain’s long-term goal is to improve operational efficiency by empowering deskless workers to work smarter and make better operational decisions. Xactco in combination with BI tools such as Google Data Studio is playing a key role in achieving this goal. It will enable Hungry Lion to open more stores in less time while operating more efficiently.
“We’re using Xactco to digitalise operational tasks that need to take place in-store, where historically you would have just had a piece of paper. Typically, the regional manager would need to conduct a store visit and go through the last week’s stack of papers. Whereas now, the regional manager can sit at his laptop, wherever that is, whether he’s at home, on the road, or visiting another store because he’s able to remotely see what happened in the store the prior day. It ensures complete transparency and that’s been invaluable to us”, says Jonathan
Xactco also empowers Hungry Lion to conduct trend analyses. The data collected from these analyses, which from an insights perspective, will assist the operations teams and empower them to have in-store visibility, to self-help and to find insights on their own. Analysing the data over time highlights where stores are underperforming or where stores are recording one value where another value is anticipated. This helped Hungry Lion to blend their data successfully across different channels. Management by exception is another key benefit where issues are only escalated to management if it represents a deviation from the benchmark. This led to Hungry Lion establishing a deviation workflow running in the background and plugging into the Xactco data that will pick up any deviation that is beyond an established/acceptable norm. These trends would have been impossible to find without Xactco’s exception-based management as it would take days to filter through the “good” data to find the anomalies.
30% cost savings in oil leading in oil leading to improved recipes and reduced food costs
One of the tangible and quantifiable benefits Hungry Lion could see was that the lifespan of oil used in their stores improved by 30% which was very important to Hungry Lion. An additional benefit to the oil savings was that overreach became easy to pinpoint. It also came to light that the oil was overcompensating which led to a discovery of excessive oil shrinkage. Because everyone is now following the same process, it could now be validated and get to a point where the recipes could be adjusted which, in turn, improved their food cost ratios dramatically which has resulted in improved gross profits.
Final thoughts
Xactco is the main digital platform used by Hungry Lion to manage deskless workers, aggregate the required operation data, and ensure quality assurance at ground level. Currently, Hungry Lion is using Xactco at 240 of their stores across Africa with Zambia seeing the steepest growth. Using Xactco not only freed up their operations managers’ time but being able to derive accurate trends from data analysis is continuously improving Hungry Lion’s bottom line.
