Check out how you can use 5S for restaurants as your recipe to keep it productive and lean. Customer will love to visit and your employees will thrive!
We have been talking about applying 5S to manufacturing, logistics and services; now it is time to apply 5s to restaurants. 5S is well known as a methodology to improve employee involvement, reduce waste, organize flow and reduce safety hazards, so why not applying it to the kitchen.
Applying 5S to restaurants will also help in reducing wait time and prevent errors. These two factors are key to increase customer satisfaction and ensuring high profitability by quick tables turn over.
In order to achieve these improvements, each and every restaurant area should be subject to 5S: the kitchen, the salon, the hostess desk, the drive-thru area, the bathrooms, the storage area. And each and every element should be sorted, stored in the right place at the right time with the right amount, and look like new. Always. Here is how you do it:
1) Sort:
Check all the areas, and look for elements that are out of place, that are broken, dirty or past due. Everything needs to be in the right place, if you don’t need it in that place, just move it where it belongs, trash it or sell it. Specially Kitchen spaces and storage areas should only contain what is needed to avoid cross- contamination. Restaurants typically have lots of decoration, which make them very colorful indeed, but through time, those pictures, ornaments and wreaths may deteriorate. Remove or fix items that are not in good conditions. Drive-thru areas are also sometimes used to store stuff, but remember that customers are checking everything.
2) Store:
Everything needs to be organized and stored so that can be find easily in less than 30 seconds. Use labels, containers and color codes to help you remember the right place for everything, and consider dating products, so that FIFO (first in first out) stock rotation can be easily followed. You also need to consider which items you want the customer to see, and which you don’t. First step is to organize items considering placing the most frequently used items nearest their doors, or the heaviest in an easy access place. For example, table cleaners and menus should be placed close to the hostess desk, but be careful! Table cleaners can contaminate food or deteriorate the menu, so keep them separate and specially keep the cleaner away from the customer view.
3) Shine:
This is the cleaning phase. Employees will not wait till lunch time is over to start cleaning. All areas should be clean at all times. Employees should live by the motto’s keep it as brand-new and leave it the same way you receive it. So if the floor is dirty, no matter which floor, you don’t wait till the cleaning staff is available, you clean it right away, to avoid falls and contamination to other areas. A cleaning schedule works great, but is not enough. Bathrooms and open kitchen get real bad in rush hour, don’t wait till a customer gets to see the mess. And remember that a place that is clean is easier to maintain, nobody wants to be the first to make it look bad.
4) Standardize:
To keep the first three steps up and running through time, standardize phase is key. Make sure to take pictures of the “ideal look” for every room, table or storage area so that is easy to keep it always the same way. Prepare check lists and schedules that include the WHO will do, WHAT will do, how will do it and WHEN will do it. Every item should have a standard, from floors to ceilings, from tables to plates, and from waiters to owner clothes. Visual aids and clear responsibilities make it easier to maintain organization. Make sure every single place and item has an owner, and that owner knows how to keep it organized.
5) Sustain:
5s can only be sustained with everybody’s help. Train the whole team with the 5S methodology, have everybody to be responsible for a part of the restaurant. Furthermore, make everyone part of the change: everything that is used, need to be returned to the same place where it was, every label or instruction needs to be followed, every error needs to be communicated. The sustain phase is achieved when every employee is self-disciplined enough to sustain what has been agreed upon. To make sure this happens, schedule periodic audits to review the different areas. Sometimes only outsiders can see the real mess.
Luciana Paulise
Founder & CEO Biztorming™ Training & Consulting
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