CASE STUDY: HUNGRY LION IMPROVES
OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY WITH FILE13’s DATA-DRIVEN METRICS

The food production industry is one of the most lucrative albeit saturated industries in South Africa. As a result, fast food outlets such as Hungry Lion are constantly seeking methods to improve efficiency and grow revenue as they grapple with challenges such as compliance, food hygiene, food safety, and managing deskless staff. Outlet managers often struggle to adequately train staff and measure staff performance and key performance indicators (KPIs). This, in turn, affects compliance, food hygiene and safety requirements, upkeep of restaurants and accountability.

Hungry Lion has been using Bloodhound’s FILE13 deskless workforce management platform since early 2018. It has been implemented at more than 250 Hungry Lion stores across all the countries that they trade in and offered increased flexibility, transparency, and productivity. Jonathan Symonds, Head of Insights, together with a small team of analysts, used business intelligence (BI) tools to analyse Hungry Lion’s FILE13 data in order to manage the business more efficiently. Jonathan’s role was to furnish data and metrics while enhancing the visibility of information for the entire operations team.

Collecting reliable data and providing accurate feedback are crucial components of performance management. Jonathan and his team started working on food cost models and successfully launched BI dashboards for the operations team. Part of that journey was obtaining validated data from FILE13 and working with the Bloodhound team to get to a point where the information was available at a granular level and could be integrated with BI tools. The goal was to ensure a uniform flow of data in the same repository. This empowered the operations teams to make decisions based on fact rather than based on gut feel.

Once the team better understood what the backend portal, Observer could do, Hungry Lion used FILE13 to structure questions and apply conditional logic to their digital checklists. This meant that workflows could be set up to cater to in-store deviations in terms of which additional context, such as a clarifying comment or a photo supporting the data, could be requested. All that information combined with a thorough understanding of the value that this tool offered, became paramount in Hungry Lion’s journey with FILE13 and their ultimate operational success.

The fast-food chain’s long-term goal is to improve operational efficiency by empowering deskless workers to work smarter and make better operational decisions. FILE13 in combination with BI tools such as Google Data Studio is playing a key role in achieving this goal. It will enable Hungry Lion to open more stores in less time while also boosting operational efficiency.

FILE13 also empowers Hungry Lion to conduct trend analyses. The data collected from these analyses will, from an insights perspective, assist the operations teams and empower them to have in-store visibility, to self-help and to find insights on their own. Analysing the data over time highlights where stores are underperforming or where stores are recording one value where another value is anticipated. This helped Hungry Lion to blend their data successfully across different channels. Management by exception is another key benefit where issues are only escalated to management if it represents a deviation from the benchmark. This led to Hungry Lion establishing a deviation workflow running in the background and plugging into the FILE13 data that will pick up any deviation that is beyond an established/acceptable norm. These trends would have been impossible to find without FILE13’s exception-based management as it would take days to filter through the “good” data to find the anomalies.

FILE13 also empowers Hungry Lion to conduct trend analyses. The data collected from these analyses will, from an insights perspective, assist the operations teams and empower them to have in-store visibility, to self-help and to find insights on their own. Analysing the data over time highlights where stores are underperforming or where stores are recording one value where another value is anticipated. This helped Hungry Lion to blend their data successfully across different channels. Management by exception is another key benefit where issues are only escalated to management if it represents a deviation from the benchmark. This led to Hungry Lion establishing a deviation workflow running in the background and plugging into the FILE13 data that will pick up any deviation that is beyond an established/acceptable norm. These trends would have been impossible to find without FILE13’s exception-based management as it would take days to filter through the “good” data to find the anomalies.