Pivoting Your Restaurant Assets For Delivery and Pickup

#N/A

Restaurants across the country have either closed overnight or had to shift to doing takeout only. States have ordered food services to close off their dining rooms to prevent the spread of COVID-19. For some restaurants, it was an easy change. For others, it required a lot of moving things around.

No one knows exactly how long the situation will mandate dining room closures. It could be another couple of weeks, or it could be several months. Knowing how to pivot your assets for pick-up, and having a plan for how to go back to having guests at your facilities is crucial to continue getting business.

Identify Previous Restaurant Asset Usage

Before you can figure out how you’re going to use your assets in light of these big changes, you need to know how you were using them before.

What assets were utilized to support customers in your dining room? Did you have take out capabilities set up beforehand? How many of your assets were devoted to serving customers in your dining room, and how many were relegated for takeout? Do you have assets that were used for both?

Identify Current Needs

There are several things that have changed now that your orders have shifted over to takeout. Plating orders is done differently, you have to shift over to disposable containers for your food, and learn how to put orders together in a way that can be delivered.

The first question you want to ask yourself is if certain restaurant assets can be used to pivot your establishment for takeout. If they weren’t previously used for takeout, how can their usage change to support your new way of serving customers? We have a couple of ideas.

Reusable dining ware likely isn’t being used anymore. However, you’re likely still using cooking materials.

Are you experiencing more orders or fewer? Do the busy times happen at the same time as before, or have they shifted?

Instead of plating orders and serving them, now you need to store your orders until your customers or delivery service can come to pick them up. Tables that once seated customers can then be used to separate and store orders so they go to the right person.

To further minimize contact, your restaurant can also transform parking spaces to curbside pickup or drive-thru. That way, customers don’t have to come inside and you can limit their exposure to the food as well.

Record Changes in Restaurant Asset Usage

Once you know how your fixed assets are currently being used, you’ll want to record those changes in your database. Even if you don’t think these changes will last once things have gone back to normal, you’ll need to record what you’re currently doing. Having this information on hand will help you when you’re balancing the books for the quarter. It’ll also help you record asset usage during this service upset. Since you can’t predict normal usage during this time, you’ll need to manually enter what you’ve done during this time. Doing this can help you determine how to change the asset life cycle usage when you’re back open.

Knowing how your restaurant assets are used during this strange time can help you determine what sorts of equipment you might need to purchase, and what sorts of equipment you might be able to put into storage.

Being able to pivot to the changes in the market is what’s going to help your restaurant continue functioning in sudden dips in demand. Bringing your assets along with you will help you when the time comes to balance your books.

By:

Mel Van De Graaff

Mel creates research driven content for companies in the health and wellness field, and specializes in creating action driven blog posts for Mental Health and Self Help topics as well as creating white papers and case studies.

Learn more from an Asset Panda expert

Get a FREE consultation with an asset tracking expert to find out how you can transform your asset tracking

Get a Demo