Mitchells & Butlers, the largest casual dining restaurant chain in the United Kingdom, ranks excellent customer service as mission critical and sought a digital solution to transform its operations.
Restaurants like Mitchells & Butlers undergo pre-opening and closing checks, health and safety checks, cleaning schedules for storerooms and kitchens, and general managers’ checklists and more. All of which require data capture via paper-based forms. Behind the scenes of its 1,700 restaurants, Mitchells & Butlers’ teams were logging just as much time filling out forms as they did preparing meals.
In fact, the management team at Mitchells & Butlers used nearly 3 million pieces of paper per year to complete essential processes. The company realized that it needed to streamline its data capture process so its staff could spend more time on delighting customers.
To do so, Mitchells & Butlers turned to Nintex Forms for Office 365 and Nintex Mobile digitized its operational processes.
The Nintex solution offers an ideal path to workflow automation that transformed a previously painful process for Mitchells & Butlers. Nintex technology was easy to implement and has saved the company more than £470,000 annually since implementing in May 2015.
To understand how Mitchells & Butlers has successfully used workflow, forms, and mobile app capabilities from Nintex, let’s review three key strategies:
1. Leverage Your Cloud Environment
Paper is not able to scale across 1,700 locations, especially when Mitchells & Butlers management needed to crosscheck forms from multiple locations. By using Microsoft Office 365, the company avoided building and maintaining an on-premises infrastructure.
2. Make it Mobile
Mitchells and Butlers enhanced its digital transformation strategy by building mobile forms with Nintex Mobile that enabled its restaurant teams to quickly and easily complete forms from mobile devices. The same form triggered a Nintex workflow that automatically synced the content to the cloud.
“We had a paper form for checking dry stores that had an exhaustive list of check-off questions for the managers to work through. Now, that’s all gone,” says Mitchells & Butlers Safety Assurance Manager Ian Culture.
“We’ve taken a picture of the perfect dry store environment and brought it to life with animated bubbles that point out how the manager’s store should resemble the picture. It removes all ambiguity from what the requirements are.”
3. Focus on People (Employees and Customers)
Mitchells & Butlers puts people first and strives to offer continuous training for its employees.“With Nintex Forms, we can deliver on-the-spot training precisely when it can do the most good,” adds Cutler. For example, if a manager records a temperature for a frozen fish that exceeds standards, the Nintex form presents a panel that details the correct safety procedure to handle the fish.
After implementing these strategies, Mitchells & Butlers staff is free to focus on ‘front of house’ duties and take care of customers. With Nintex reliably driving processes end-to-end ‘back of house’, they can focus on boosting restaurant ratings and creating a memorable restaurant experience.
