How to read a service instead of a monthly report

Before doors: the prep decision

The most expensive decision of the day is made before a single guest arrives — how much of each prep item to make. Look at what the same day of the week actually sold over the last three weeks, not at what you feel is likely.

• Which items were 86'd last week, and did demand actually justify more prep?
• Which prep items were carried over or discarded, and how often?
• Which supplier deliveries arrived short or substituted, changing what you can offer?

During service: exceptions only

Mid-service is not the time for dashboards. It is the time for exceptions — the small number of things that are behaving differently from normal and can still be corrected.

• A dish leaving the pass much slower than its usual time.
• A high-margin item quietly running down while a low-margin substitute absorbs the demand.
• A table whose order has sat unmodified far longer than the room average.

After doors: the fifteen-minute review

The most useful review is short and same-day, while memory is intact. Three questions are enough: what did we sell, what did we lose, and what do we change tomorrow.

Written down, those three answers accumulate into something a monthly report can never give you — a record of causes rather than totals.

This is the rhythm Ordena is designed around. Ordering, operations and inventory sit in one system, so the questions above can be answered during service rather than reconstructed afterwards.