Is your food service business facing a downtime emergency because of broken appliances? A little downtime in business is inconvenient. When commercial kitchen appliances break in food service businesses, downtime can mean the difference between being able to rebound quickly and dealing with significant financial losses. Here’s what you need to know about disruptions.
What Is Downtime?
Downtime is any type of issue that affects a business from doing its day-to-day operations. While you often hear about downtime in IT, disasters can strike in any industry when least expected whether it is with power losses or broken equipment. If you work in the foodservice industry, broken appliances will cause you to shut your doors, which is what downtime means precisely. Productivity is a vital part of being able to make revenue and pay bills, so what can a loss cost?
An IT issue can cost about $5600 a minute, but companies usually are able to get back online quickly, which mitigates their losses. If your kitchen appliances break, you can’t easily prevent downtime because you either need to call us for a repair or wait until new replacements arrive. For food service businesses, downtime will easily consume several days of your profits. The longer the downtime, the higher the likelihood that a food service business won’t recover.
How Can Food Service Businesses Reduce Downtime?
The first thing to know is that you must have a business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place before a disaster occurs. When you anticipate downtime, you know what you need to do when it happens. Thinking ahead will reduce the amount of time your business is not open to customers. Your staff also knows what response steps to follow to reduce the overall downtime.
Things To Include In A Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery Plan
When creating a food service business continuity and disaster recovery plan, you need to focus on issues like utility downtime, appliance back-up, payment systems, and equipment losses.
- Have a backup generator or a solar panel in case of the loss of power. Not only will you be able to open, but it ensures the refrigeration system works to prevent food losses.
- Have a back-up plan for your payment system since you won’t be able to process credit cards when your internet is down. You can use an app on your iPhone as a back-up plan.
- Regularly back up your files in case of a power loss or cyber attack to avoid data loss. Having a cloud-based backup will also allow you to access your business files remotely.
- Buy equipment warranties. Equipment warranties will cover repair or replacement costs. While it costs more, it ensures a quicker commercial equipment repair or replacement.
- A disaster recovery plan must include insurance that covers your losses after a natural catastrophe. Insurers offer specialized business packages to cover these type of damages.
- Always have a downtime fund set aside to cover equipment repair or replacement costs.
Scheduling annual maintenance checks as part of your business continuity plan for food service equipment prevents downtime losses, so give us a call at (781) 953-9600 or visit us on Facebook.