To mark SRE's 10th anniversary, we've compiled the 10 most important things that you can do to make your facilities and operations more efficient and profitable.

10

Understand customer demand patterns—week-to-week, day-to-day, hour-to-hour. Knowing when your customers visit and what they order is a critical step in labor scheduling, food production, and capacity planning.

9

Establish performance criteria, then measure. Critical control points determine overall restaurant performance and should be measured. Hold your management team accountable to concept specific performance metrics.

8

Know where you spend your labor. Make sure that most of your limited labor dollars are spent on tasks that actually add value for guests. Time and motion studies accurately quantify the work content in every task.

7

Managers should manage. Match your management team structure to the types of management tasks and the level of responsibility required for each. Make sure your managers don't become overpaid dishwashers.

6

Hire the best people you can afford and continuously train them. A restaurant is a complex system of equipment, information, and people. Even the most well-engineered kitchen will falter without the right people.

5

Invest in equipment and technology that delivers impact. Use equipment as a means to achieve your operational objectives, such as improved food safety and quality, reduced footprint, or faster cook times.

4

Understand the "theory of constraints." All restaurants have at least one constraint. The key to driving sales is increasing the throughput capacity of your restaurants' constraining resources.

3

Design your facilities to meet your financial goals. Make sure you have "right-sized" resources, and an efficient operations platform to minimize capital investment, maximize throughput capacity, and improve ROI.

2

Implement a labor management system. Unit-level managers need a tool to schedule the right labor at the right time. A good system includes accurate forecasting, optimal staffing guidelines, and performance reporting.

1

Develop an optimal prototype. Competition is fierce and the margins are thin. You need a competitive advantage. An optimal (vs. functional) prototype simultaneously delivers the best possible labor productivity, guest experience, throughput capacity, and capital investment.

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