Ensuring that your store runs smoothly takes a lot of expertise and effort. Smart operators obsessively look to improve speed of service, which explains the plethora of efficiency metrics that are meticulously reviewed every single day. But even with such dedication to refining operational efficiency, a dynamic business like a drive thru or a carwash will inevitably have ‘fires’ to put out, throughout the day. Mechanical issues, employee mishaps, and incorrect demand forecasting are just a few of the many ways in which your store could see long lines and unhappy customers. And what if you have to keep an eye on more than one store — across several states, with varying regulations, time zones and different visitor patterns? This is a tall task for even the most seasoned operations executive.
This has spurred a wave of analytics services designed to help headquarters understand and address issues at each of their stores. But in reality, the burden remains on the head of operations to sift through mountains of data embedded in a multitude of dizzying dashboards. Too much time is spent learning how to read the reports and keeping lower-level operations managers accountable with their reporting, rather than actually addressing the issues in real-time. So is there a better way to keep an eye on each of your stores and solve analytics for the physical world?
That’s where omniX labs comes in. We simply connect our cloud-based software to your existing security cameras and turn them into an intelligent set of eyes. By identifying and tracking every vehicle that enters your stores, omniX is able to paint a real-time picture of customer behavior and how efficiently the store is being run.
Rather than simply checking the raw number of customers processed in a given hour, diving deeper into your loader efficiency can reveal whether an express tunnel is truly running at max capacity. As an example, you may use these insights to identify that a shift of employees could be serving 20 more customers per hour — and bringing in more revenue. Also, truly understanding customer behavior, in the form of average visit duration or time spent in a specific part of the lot (e.g drive-in bays vs drive-thru lanes), tells the operator how effectively each service area is being utilized and what needs to be prioritized.
For the operators that need a helping hand in putting out the aforementioned ‘fires’, omniX labs provides threshold-based alerts. When a mechanical failure causes lines to be held up, each minute that the customer is left unaddressed is critical. Rather than waiting for onsite staff to report back to headquarters while trying to put out the ‘fire’, a real-time alert can allow the entire operations team to get ahead of the issue and strategically coordinate a solution. For example, you may know that when the visit duration at your drive-thru exceeds 12 minutes, there must be a problem. You can configure that threshold into the omniX Portal so that when this occurs, you are immediately alerted. This threshold-based alerting can be configured with other key metrics, like loader efficiency, rewash ratio and more.
Running a business smoothly is both art and science. But with improved technology to capture insights and a seamless way to be notified in real-time, omniX labs is helping to make the science of operations easier to master.
Learn more about how omniX labs can help your business at omnixlabs.com
