
How a Management System Improves the Daily Operation of Central Kitchen
In recent years, Central Kitchen becomes a trend for organizations to facilitate the food prep processes and expand their markets rapidly. Central Kitchen is not only created and owned by a single organization with multiple branches, but is also rented out to smaller restaurants to grow their businesses without occupying any cooking space. However, maintaining a Central Kitchen is costly and complex due to the high-volume production. Therefore, the management system acts as a systematic framework to ensure companies comply with the policies and procedures set by them.
Common Problems
1. Human Dependency
Most of the Central Kitchens still operate in a very manual way, which depend on paper-based records, hence human errors are likely to occur. Managing human resources is crucial yet troublesome as Central Kitchen requires an enormous number of employees. As a matter of fact, the employee turnover rate in Central Kitchen is relatively high. After a staff is replaced, the new staff have to adapt to the new environment and quickly get used to the production operations. Without any SOPs to be followed, it is tremendously difficult to assure the quality controls of processes and products.
2. Traceability
Keep track of the whole operation processes improves the food quality and customer satisfaction. By monitoring the operations workflow, food wastage can be tracked to minimize losses. Foodborne illness is a significant issue that can cause serious damage to customer’s health and organization’s reputation. To ensure food safety, Central Kitchens should be able to trace every item thoroughly from receiving the raw materials to delivering the finished product to end users. Unfortunately, the manual way of handling food does not emphasize traceability due to redundancy.
3. Accessibility
The operators in central kitchens should be aware of the accessibility of real-time data, such as monitoring the temperature and humidity level of storages, the actual time used in production compared with the expected time, etc. Manual work is inefficient and often creates discrepancies, as a result, businesses are struggling to scale.
Outstanding Solutions
Codemax RMS significantly reduces and overcomes the problems mentioned above. RMS offers key features from recipe management, production planning, purchasing, to inventory control, labelling and packaging, distribution, and delivery.
RMS cut down labor costs through digitalization and automation of Central Kitchen processes. With the smart analysis mechanism, RMS helps to plan the production and purchasing level along with food cost calculation. Centralized knowledge retention ensures consistency and standardization, thus the quality of products can be guaranteed.
Business owners have the total control of their operations. Every process including inventory movement is tracked in real-time, hence establishing transparency and allowing up-to-date information for better decision making. Audit trails are built to view the history and past amendments of every record to prevent any fraudulent activities. If any complaints or issues are raised by customers or suppliers, companies can trace the item through the unique serial number or QR code, identify the root causes of the problem, and take corrective actions immediately.
Moreover, RMS can be accessed via web or mobile application from anywhere and at any time. It offers transparency yet restricts the access of non-related staff, assuring every staff is clear about their role and responsibility, hence duplication of work and conflicts are less likely to occur.
Improvements achieved by RMS
Although RMS achieved remarkable improvements with its competitive advantages, Codemax will not stop enhancing RMS features in accordance with continuous innovation and clients’ requirements, which makes the existing Central Kitchen constantly compatible with large scale, and caters different needs for various kinds of industries. RMS reduced human dependency, increased efficiency and productivity, minimized pilferage and wastage. Overall, businesses can upscale much more easily as their staffs can focus less on the tedious paperwork and prioritize on the things that actually matter. With the collaboration use of IoT, cloud computing, and modern machineries, Codemax has successfully merging automation into the central kitchen and transforming the traditional way of doing things in the food & beverages industry.