The recent series of The Apprentice taught everyone a valuable lesson.  Do you remember the episode where the two teams had to create a fast food outlet in two days?

If you recall Jim, the leader of Team Venture, failed to calculate how many dishes he could supply during a lunch time and what the revenues would be.  This was a basic lesson in the need to create a business plan at all levels – cost of meals – profit margins – production levels – sales activities – staffing levels.

If a business is to be successful it must first of all create a plan of what it expects to achieve and when these achievements are to be attained.

However, before this can be done it is necessary to know the costs and profitability of each food service area and its constituent parts.  This also entails knowing the cost of each meal produced and its profitability together with the complexities of production.  Using this information one can then create a plan for each week of the year and even break this down into daily targets.

Once, having created a plan it is then essential to record and monitor the actual achievements against these targets.  In this way one can see immediately if activities are falling short of expectations and enabling remedial action to be taken.

The KitMan System is an ideal tool to assist with these issues, providing costs of every dish, enabling daily forecasts to be created and comparisons of actual results against a forecast.