A restaurant can only be as good as the state of its utensils. Your team needs to work with utensils in good conditions, and also is important to have enough of them to have an uninterrupted workflow. When you have a big restaurant with only one blender, you have a problem. That is why we built a tool specifically designed to keep track of the state of utensils in your restaurant.
The Utensils tool works with a very simple concept in mind: you declare the optimal amount of utensils you need in your restaurant for it to perform at its best, and from there the app will track if you have a healthy amount or need to purchase new utensils. Managers can input events of loss of utensils, such as a blender that broke or a broom that has been tossed because it was in a bad state, or they can input events of gain of utensils when new utensils have arrived. But let's dive into the app to learn how to use it.
Let's start on the top bar. On the right side we have the Add Utensil button. Here is where you will declare the utensils you want to keep track of in your location.
Pressing the Add Utensil button will open a dialog that consists of 4 input boxes:
1- Name. Here you will name your utensil (Blender, Pot, Chef Knife).
2- Optimal Quantity. This is where you define how much of something you need for your restaurant to perform at its best.
3- Here is where you declare the Current Amount of that utensil.
4- Description. This field is optional, you can add a description of the utensil so it is easier to identify.
Let's say you need 3 Lemon Squeezers ideally so your restaurant works efficiently. Let's name the utensil Lemon squeezer, let's describe it as "the big green machine on the shelf" to make it more identifiable, and let's set our optimal quantity as 3. Let's say that we only have 2 because last week one broke down.
Let's press Save.
As you can see, we can visually receive the information that we are at 2/3 capacity and that we should purchase a new Lemon Squeezer to be at 100% capacity.
Now let's say one more Lemon squeezer fell down and broke, or water got inside of it, because accidents happen. We press the Report Change option on the utensil menu.
And we report a change. in this case we have one less Lemon Squeezer, so we can type -1 with our keyboard or we can press the inferior arrow to decrease the quantity. As the reason we enter "Water fell on it and it stopped working".
As you can see after pressing accept, we are now at 33% capacity and a red color emphasizes the urgency of purchasing new lemon squeezers if we want our restaurant to work properly.
A couple days go by and 2 new lime squeezers have arrived, we go again to the Report Change button and this time we introduce an increment of 2 Lemon squeezers and as the reason we introduce "2 Lemon squeezers have been purchased and received" and press Save.
As you can see, we are back to 100% capacity. Our Goal with the Utensils tool is to be as close to the 100% mark as possible.
We can see the history of increments and decrements in a utensil's amount in the Changes Option.
The Changes dialog displays the history of the last increment or decrement events. It shows the date of the event, the amount of the decrement/increment, the reason of the event and the name of the employee that submitted the event.
Last but not least we have the Edit option.
Here we can edit the item, to set a new optimal/current amount or change the name/description of the item, and we can also delete the item if we press the Delete option.
Do not underestimate the importance of this tool. As we say all the time, a restaurant is only as good as the state of its utensils.
That is all there is to know about the Utensils tool.