A fast-casual restaurant chain with hundreds of locations across North America, this brand is known for its flavorful food, dedication to quality, and commitment to public safety. With a strong focus on customer service and brand consistency, the company has built a reputation for excellence, making it a popular choice for diners and franchisees alike.
This restaurant has experienced significant growth over the years, expanding to nearly 1,200 locations across multiple regions. This rapid expansion brought new challenges, particularly around maintaining food safety, quality control, and brand standards at every site.
opportunity
As the restaurant chain grew, maintaining consistency across locations became increasingly difficult. While they had adopted an auditing platform to assess operational practices, it lacked several key features that the team needed to scale their quality management efforts effectively. These challenges included:
- Limited self-service tools for creating and managing forms related to food safety and quality compliance
- Difficulty distributing form changes across all locations quickly
- Inability to flag repeat violations for targeted support
- Lack of customized workflows, reports, and notifications for each program
- No offline functionality for auditors using different devices
- Limited reporting capabilities and visibility into site performance for senior management
The chain needed a more flexible, user-friendly solution to drive operational excellence and scale efficiently with their growth.
action
In response, the company transitioned to CMX1's ActivitiesX1 platform in late 2018. This solution enabled the team to enforce brand consistency and compliance with greater ease across its rapidly expanding franchise network. By early 2019, the new system was fully deployed, allowing the company to track quality control and food safety across all locations.
ActivitiesX1 provided the company with the flexibility and agility it needed to stay ahead in a highly competitive industry. Internal auditors conducted more than 10,000 audits since the system’s launch, using the platform’s mobile-friendly tools for seamless audits both online and offline.
The restaurant chain leveraged ActivitiesX1 in several critical areas:
- Ensuring brand standards and SOP compliance: Auditors used the platform to conduct restaurant audits that measured food safety, quality, customer service, and compliance with brand standards. The audits, which were conducted several times a year, helped identify areas for improvement and ensured consistency across all sites.
- Identifying non-compliance and implementing corrective actions: The platform flagged repeat violations, allowing auditors to quickly identify trends of non-compliance. This enabled faster corrective actions and helped improve restaurant performance over time.
- Brand development support: ActivitiesX1 supported the company’s real estate team by streamlining the inspection process for new or remodeled locations. The platform’s checklists and photo upload features made it easier to track progress and ensure everything was up to standard.
- Data analytics and visualization: Using Tableau, ActivitiesX1 provided the leadership team with valuable insights into operational trends and risks. The data allowed them to make informed, data-driven decisions to improve overall performance.
outcome
Implementing ActivitiesX1 greatly enhanced the restaurant chain’s ability to maintain food safety, brand standards, and operational excellence. Key outcomes included:
- Greater visibility into site performance and compliance across all locations
- A more streamlined auditing process with customizable workflows and reports
- Faster issue resolution through Corrective Action and Preventative Action (CAPA) workflows
- Improved ability to manage the onboarding process for new locations and franchisees
- Real-time data collection and reporting for more informed decision-making at the executive level
