Zaxby's Controls Food and Product Quality

 

Zaxby’s Streamlines Quality Incident Management with ArrowStream Software

 

Zaxby's Logo

Spread across the Southeast United States with over 900 locations, Zaxby’s restaurant chain has been offering craveable menu items like chicken fingers, wings, sandwiches, and salads for 30 years.

However, with a high volume of food inventory and franchise locations to manage, Zaxby’s team struggled with using manual inventory systems to provide quality assurance. This led Zaxby’s to implement ArrowStream’s Quality Incident Management (QIM) software to optimize its quality incident management processes.

 

 

The challenges of using outdated processes

Before implementing the ArrowStream solution, Zaxby’s corporate supply chain teams were bogged down by time-consuming quality monitoring and limited staff when trying to manage and mitigate risk across franchise locations.

These challenges were due to many causes, including:

  • Sifting through data sources and reports for hours each day
  • Slowed or obstructed communication about quality incidents or complaints
  • Difficult to trace and identify the source of quality problems
  • Delayed incident resolution from lack of centralized information regarding the event

“It was an all-manual, time-consuming system,” Rob Adkisson, Zaxby’s Quality Assurance Manager recalled. “Our past quality incident process entailed firing emails back and forth trying to get corrective action. Then, sending emails back to the store to make sure the store received its credit.”

Steve Miller, Zaxby’s Director of Distribution added, “If our corporate supply chain team had a question about a store-level incident, we would contact the store via email and often end up with streams of messages regarding a single incident, adding complexity to get to a resolution. From a distributor perspective, we also had no single source to track problems that were service-related.”

Without a tool to appropriately track quality incidents or see into relevant data, Zaxby’s quality assurance team lacked critical transparency and traceability into their supply chain operations.

 

Tech-enabled quality incident management

After researching several quality incident management systems, ArrowStream’s software was the optimal solution for streamlining incident resolution and realizing new efficiencies with the platform’s unique features and capabilities.

ArrowStream’s QIM delivers complaint notifications, quality trend analytics, and real-time platform workflows. So Zaxby’s quality assurance team is now able to easily identify inconsistencies in quality and promote risk management strategies across their franchisees.

This software also enables enhanced collaboration across teams, partners, and locations to effectively resolve quality issues.

“ArrowStream helps us connect our restaurant operators with distributor partners, suppliers and the corporate supply chain teams,” Rob Adkisson, Zaxby’s Quality Assurance Manager explained. “ArrowStream does this seamlessly through its software workflow, which takes everyone less than 90 seconds to initiate.”

 

Gain accountability with real-time data

Zaxby's Director of Purchasing

Data can be collected from all incident reports to determine overarching issues and evaluate supplier performance by consistent standards. This ensures faster incident resolution, shorter credit recovery periods, and fewer quality incidents.

With these data insights and ArrowStream’s predetermined quality metrics, Zaxby’s can ensure that everyone knows exactly what goals have been successful, as well as which ones to refocus and improve upon. Accountability across Zaxby’s supply chain and partners is then delegated accordingly through accessible software operator dashboards.

Gary Nash, Zaxby’s Director of Purchasing, explained how ArrowStream’s metrics and dashboard help Zaxby’s develop smart KPIs through accountability:

“QIM provides accountability to the restaurant location by making sure they have proper receiving guidelines in place. It ensures accountability at the restaurant and distributor level, as well as accountability within supplier, purchasing, and quality teams because now data is being flowed in a trackable, reportable way. Now, restaurants can communicate issues about their service, delivery, or food products.”

 

Enhance product quality to reduce inventory losses

The benefits of ArrowStream’s QIM system are both immediate and long-term. Detailed product quality data enables successful end-to-end inventory quality control, so fewer products go to waste or become non-compliant during supply chain movement. This is also conducive to lower inventory quantities on-hand and proactive mitigation of supply chain disruptions.

Taking streamlined processes a step further with automated credit matching against all invoices, Zaxby’s can confirm that resolution is complete and satisfactory. Outstanding credits are highlighted with organized data so no charges are left outstanding.

 

Impressed with ArrowStream's Quality Incident Management software

ArrowStream’s QIM software ensures Zaxby’s time and budget is maximized with intelligent data that quickly records incident information and recurring trends, allowing them to deliver optimal customer experiences.

“The dashboard is just great. The reporting that we’re able to pull off is extremely helpful. It’s become our data set for measuring service level and product issues from a delivery standpoint,” said Steve.

Rob described ArrowStream’s QIM as “a powerful collaboration tool that can really show insight into the brand’s quality program and service of their distribution centers.”

 

Get direct insight into critical quality issues

With increased visibility, Zaxby’s supply chain team can ensure that no one needs to solve quality issues alone and managers can immediately see when action items are completed.

Quality issues and complaints can be recorded at a store level with a fast, notified workflow to relevant supply chain partners. So what does Zaxby’s shift to ArrowStream’s QIM mean for their incident resolution?

By using ArrowStream’s QIM, Zaxby’s corporate quality assurance team can resolve quality issues 50% faster as a result of partner collaboration when compared to a manual quality management system.

“ArrowStream gives us transparency into what the stores are sending or issues they’re seeing. With our old system, we relied on communication from the distribution center to share issues with us so we might never know anything was going on. Now, we can see what the stores are seeing and we can hold our suppliers and distribution centers more accountable and responsible for quality issues,” said Rob.

Zaxby's Streamlines their Food Quality Program