Delivering labor savings and peace of mind to Chick-fil-A Hollywood restaurants
"The pandemic created stressors at every stage of the process, from labor to supply chain. We were stretched thin in juggling the complexities of running a restaurant in the middle of a crisis.
ConnectedFresh helped us win back that time, automating food safety processes to allow us to focus first and foremost on our guests and then our team. While we are moving out of crisis, ConnectedFresh’s solutions will remain a critical component of our restaurants. We didn't know what we didn't know; just how much of a benefit they would be to our time and energy until we had them in place."
- Caleb G, Chick-fil-A Hollywood
Challenge
The Chick-fil-A Hollywood team manages many successful CFA locations, but the Covid-19 crisis created systemic stressors that challenged previous norms. More than ever, drive-through demand was surging and guest experiences took additional time due to local required precautions, all while labor was becoming increasingly scarce.
The team had a temperature monitoring system in place, but there were many issues, including unscheduled downtime and frequent required battery changes. The system that was supposed to save the company time quickly became a headache with more to manage and monitor, and ultimately it did not meet their notification needs.
Solution
ConnectedFresh implemented a temperature monitoring solution, delivering immediate alerts if something was out of range so the team could fix it before it became a problem. Escalation paths were set up to deliver proper notifications via Slack, SMS, email, and voice calls.
To compare to its existing solution, a pilot was started with its other system still in place. After some testing, the Chick-fil-A team was very impressed by the difference of functionality, ease of setup and use, compatibility, and battery life. Years later, sensors are still reporting with over a 90% battery life. ConnectedFresh then became the standard temperature monitoring tool for all of its equipment and locations.
Built on AWS, the ConnectedFresh team used advanced services to deliver agile solutions to hospitality customers, including this temperature monitoring use case.
The Chick-fil-A team became great partners in continuously building the product to be better than it was the day before. If there was an integration that could help it even more (i.e. Slack notifications for their entire team), ConnectedFresh built it. If it had an idea that didn't yet exist, ConnectedFresh added it to the backlog for future development.
Results
The Chick-fil-A Hollywood team (in addition to many other Chick-fil-A teams) immediately saw results. Savings due to labor productivity reached nearly $60,000 and savings of potential losses of product were measured in tens of thousands of dollars, including a few incidents that directly saved almost $20,000.
Services
AWS Services used include AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN, AWS Lambda, AWS Amplify, Amazon RDS, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Route 53, Amazon ECS, and more. For additional information including architecture, click here.
