We finished the week tired and battered (not dipped in flour-based goo for frying). This is the 1st week both for the POS full on plus the BP600 oven. We were pleased Tues and Wed when we were done. It was not a big trasition, and we got our systems shaked out a litte. Oven performed way above expectations. We burned maybe one pizza in the learning curve. POS made so many systems smoother. This was good since we had a higher than average volume those days.
Thursday rolled up, and we added our weekend cook, plus more volume. Oven swallowed every pizza we could put into it, and spit it back out crispy brown and in short order. No heat recovery issues even on the heaviest hour. We only have ONE of the two decks going (ordered a missing stone for the other one), and the production ease and quality outpace the Blodgett981 by leaps and bounds. Point of Success shines as we are able to make menu and database edits on the fly, system is robust, and customer service staff is getting more fluid with the process.
Friday and Saturday were “dough on the ceiling” days. We call it “soap dropped” days. If we were still using our old systems and equipment from last week, we would have crashed, burned and lost customers. It was still a big challenge ith our biggest volume hour Friday was bigger than all Wednesday. Oven shined! The bottle-neck was our ability to make and cut/box them fast enough with everything else going through the kitchen. Saturday we had some issues with cold/underfermented dough and customer surge on a night when we had a couple people off. We did all this through our third-highest sales weekend ever . . . and with ONE station operating with the POS.
We will be debriefing the staff and upgrading our prep, boxed food handling, customer handling, and other processes. Equipment is now excellent, and we need to upgrade procedures and staff to meet the capacity of the equipment and food. We are moving into our peak season and can make really good progress if we are ready for it.
Well that is great news Nick! I think it will only get better with time…I know for us the 2nd deck becomes a lifesaver during the peak hours. You will all be seasoned and ready to go for the busy season.
I’m seriously thinking about getting Point Of Success this month, but money is still pretty tight from purchasing the shop. Do you have a dine in area? How many phone lines were you operating with the single station? Did your employees pick up on the new system pretty fast? How much training did they get?
I’m not sure how many stations to invest in to start out and how long to spend training on the POS before going “live”.
Yeah I’d be very interested in hearing what you started with on the Point of Success also Nick. I really am impressed with Jeff’s responses and his temperment on the boards. I like what I’ve seen on their website with tech and user support. I like the fact I can save several hundreds of dollars by buying it in the next couple of days. I’d love to know what you ended up with for programing and workstations.
Good work buddy. Now you get the feeling what is like REALLY working and not just playing pizza making
For cutting do you use a rocker cutter or a disc cutter? If the latter have heaps of boxes pre made to save time. We have a wall mounted box holding system above the cutting bench with the 4 sizes, 1 shute for smalls, 3 for larges and 1 each for Family and Jumbo sizes. Each shute holds about 35 high made up boxes and we just pull the required one out, the rest drop down etc. Saves heaps of time and keeps the staff occupied when it’s quiet folding and restocking the unit. It was cheap to make as well (about $350 in materials).
And don’t act surprised that things went bottom up a bit because staff shortages. This is the norm when people are away … you always get smashed, things breakdown or go missing etc … it’s called the pizza owners curse :lol: We had it on Saturday night. One of the make persons had to leave at 7pm which would have been OK but one front counter person didn’t show due to illness and no backup staff available leaving me on the bench alone (was planning on bringing one of the counter staff to the bench) for the peak period doing about $1500 in 2hours - no mistakes and no time lags ( I felt like superpizzaman ) Luckily no breakdowns or things going belly up. The pizza gods must have been smiling on me that night.
Keep us informed of your progress especially when you get the 2nd oven fired up.
Thanks for the props everyone. We use a mengerie of cutters: small wheel, large wheel, and 20" rocker. The rocker is used for pies with liots of toppings or extera cheese . . . keeps it more intact when cutting. Quicker to do smaller pies with the large wheel. Small wheel is for ‘sweet’ pies like cinnamon and our apple pie.
Any chance of getting a photo of your box chute? We fold up a gang of boxes and keep on hand, but I like the self-feeding chute idea. I have a welding friend who can help me out if needed.
Indie, go out and get Point of Success. You’ll make the money back very quickly. Your ordertaking time will be alot quicker, you won’t have any pricing errors. Plus, It opens a whole book of marketing stuff.
) Luckily no breakdowns or things going belly up. The pizza gods must have been smiling on me that night.