Jet's Pizza enhances inspections with ProntoForms

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success story

The Challenge

Eugene Jetts and his brother John opened their first restaurant in 1978 in Sterling Heights Michigan, since then, they have grown the business year over year from the first small restaurant to over 235 locations. This type of rapid growth has required entrepreneurial spirit and a creative self-made management system for handling growth. The most critical control for growing Jet's is the quality of food served to their loyal customers - there could be no compromise.

So, how do you improve a process that has evolved through hands-on knowledge over the decades? Changes cannot be dis- ruptive, the current business system in place is exactly why Jet's exists, thrives and is growing. The answer is don't change the business process that works - just eliminate the waste, redundancy of efforts and organize it better - but don't change how the team in the field get their core work done, just make it better.

Jeff Tamachaski, Director of Training is responsible for ensuring all store locations meet the high standards of the original Jet's - from the quality of fresh ingredients through to the final food served to customers. The quality business inspection system that Jeff inherited had a proven track record. Eugene and John had perfected a system to ensure one location operated the same as all the others - the foundation for successful growth. The remaining challenge was the system was based on paper forms and clipboards, requiring field inspectors to retype the reports into emails, send them back to the head office. Finally, these reports were then entered manually into business reports for the VP of Operations.

It was an inefficient business process that was prone to errors, slowed inspections and frequently delayed reporting back to the head office. The pace of business growth for Jet's required a new creative approach to improve the speed and quality of reporting and access to information - Jeff knew there had to be a better way.


The Solution

Jeff understood the paper-based system had met its limits - the process was impeding the accuracy and speed of reporting back to HQ. Waiting up to two weeks for a reports form the field meant that a problem that could have been resolved today - sometimes were unattended for weeks while reports slowly made their way through the old system.

With the ultimate objective of increasing productivity to handle swifter growth, Jeff wanted to eliminate the reporting bottlenecks and delays - he wanted to get more form his current team, yet not have to hire more people. A pleasant surprise for Jeff was the platform to meet his objective, smartphones, were already in the hands of his store inspectors. With wireless abilities, including 3G, WiFi and GPS - these devices were super platforms for field workers, if they could be married to the right software, he would have his solution.

After doing his homework, including research on the Web, combined with a discussion with his AT&T business representative, Jeff realized ProntoForms was his solution. By adding ProntoForms apps to the smartphones he was able to transfer Jet's Pizza store inspection system directly onto the devices - 100% customized to Jet's needs - no change to what information that was collected, just a faster and more accurate way to collect the information.

A bonus to Jeff, ProntoForms also has a Web portal for reporting information collected from the field. Jeff now has the ability to track reports form the field, export data and view a dashboard of daily prog-ress - if there's an issue in the field, Jeff knows about it immediately, and he can react today - not in two weeks.


The Benefits

Jeff estimated the cost of printing forms for store inspectors, duplicate data entry, including redundant input for reports back at the office and overall lost productivity was costing Jet's thousands of dollars a year per inspector in the field. If this wasn't bad enough, the slow speed of paper-based reporting could negatively impact quality service for customers. Considering Jet's Pizza is in rapid growth mode, a reporting bottleneck was unacceptable - ProntoForms responded to all of these challenges in one easy to implement solution.

"When I got my hands on ProntoForms I knew we were moving in the right direction. We looked at other solutions but we were immediately sold on ProntoForms because of the customization factor. Eugene and John had spent too much brain power creating our quality controls - they would never agree to change or compromise our system, ProntoForms allowed us to keep our system, simply move onto a smart phone."

"Our head of Franchising and our VP of operations have now become the biggest fans of ProntoForms because of the instant reporting. Crucial reporting from the field that would sometimes take weeks to get back to the office, and it's now available the moment the report is submitted. We've set-up a dashboard report on the ProntoForms portal to track the ranking and performance of our restaurants - this strict eye on quality is the foundation of our success."

"Hitting 235 stores was great moment in our history, but it will soon be remembered as a milestone as we keep growing each quarter. Growing at this speed has its rewards and challenges; we knew we needed smart and easy business tools to help us meet our objectives. ProntoForms is now playing a crucial role helping Jet's Pizza improve the quality and speed of restaurant inspections, thereby helping Jet's Pizza grow even faster - it's transformed our business completely."