In senior living, dining management is crucial to residents’ daily life as well as the overall success of a community. To ensure excellent resident experiences, dining leaders must balance high-quality meals and service with budgeting, purchasing, compliance, training, and more. Having the right tools and support can create smoother operations and better alignment within community teams.
Strategic Dining Services transforms the way communities approach foodservice management. With their comprehensive technology suite, leaders gain access to real-time insights and dashboards and are able to streamline purchasing, optimize costs, and run operations more efficiently.
SDS Dashboards: Enhancing Senior Living Dining
One of the most powerful tools in SDS’s arsenal is their dashboard, which serves as a central hub for food management insights. Integrated into Power BI, the dashboard provides community leadership with a high-level overview as well as in-depth data across key areas like finance, purchasing, standardization, and culinary compliance.
Key Features:
- Finance Insights: The finance section of the dashboard allows users to closely monitor food costs, including meals for residents, guests, and staff, as well as grab-and-go items. By tracking the resident census and budget, community leaders can get a clear picture of their financial performance, see if they’re operating over or under budget, and easily pinpoint where to allocate costs to avoid waste.
- Purchasing & Vendor Optimization: Purchasing is another area where the SDS dashboard truly shines. It helps track purchasing costs, identify savings opportunities, and optimize vendor choices. SDS even provides rebates, making it easy to manage spending while adhering to contract obligations. With granular purchasing data—like specific fruit purchases on a particular day—kitchen managers can track and analyze their buying patterns, ensuring maximum efficiency.
- Standardization & Consistency: To ensure all communities meet the same high standards, SDS conducts regular “pulse checks,” where they visit each community to assess its compliance. These checks, along with photos and notes, are included in the dashboard so community leaders can see exactly where they stand and how they can improve.
- Culinary Compliance: The culinary compliance section of the dashboard monitors everything from kitchen operations to resident satisfaction, ensuring that all contractual goals are being met. With real-time updates and flags when something is off-track, the system helps address issues swiftly, preventing small problems from becoming larger ones.
- Integration & Automation: The SDS dashboard seamlessly integrates with other SDS tools like eFinance and Dine.OS, creating a fully automated ecosystem that updates daily. This means that leadership has access to the most up-to-date data, enabling immediate responses to any issues that arise.
How Technology Improves Daily Operations
The power of SDS’s technology lies not only in the data but also in how easy it is to use. Unlike traditional systems that require extensive training and manual data entry, SDS’s tools are intuitive and efficient, providing everything in a single interface. Dining leaders can easily track spending, monitor vendor relationships, and ensure compliance, all in real-time.
Efficiency is a key benefit of using SDS’s tools. For example, identifying a purchasing mistake, like buying a food item from the wrong vendor, would typically take hours. With SDS, this is flagged immediately, allowing teams to correct the issue in a matter of minutes. This ability to address small challenges quickly contributes to overall better management and more cost-effective operations.
Using Technology to Improve Efficiency in Senior Living
SDS’s tools have a real-world impact throughout the communities they serve. One example comes from a community where a director noticed an inefficiency in vendor spending. By using the SDS purchasing tool, they discovered that $4,000 had been spent on heavy cream from an incorrect vendor. Thanks to the detailed purchasing data, the issue was quickly addressed, and the community was able to make necessary adjustments, saving money and improving their operations moving forward.
SDS’s approach promotes a collaborative style of leadership. While the community has access to the data, the SDS team works alongside them to address issues and fine-tune the process. This partnership ensures that every decision is data-driven and backed by expert insights.
Integrated Technology that Streamlines Dining Management
SDS’ full technology ecosystem includes MealSuite for recipe management and scaled production sheets, as well as temperature logs to ensure food safety. These tools work together seamlessly to simplify operations and create consistency across all communities.
Nikki Pappas, VP of Operations, said: “Once these tools are in place, it’s hard to imagine managing without them. As one SDS team member put it, ‘What I can do in minutes would take me half an hour without this system.’ The convenience and efficiency of the technology are game changers for senior living communities.”
Embracing these innovations is essential for driving growth and improving efficiencies in the senior living space.
The Benefits
- Centralized Data: All your food management information is in one place, making it easier to track, manage, and make informed decisions.
- Customization: SDS’s tools are customizable to fit each community’s specific needs, ensuring that data and insights are aligned with goals and budgets.
- Instant Alerts & Flags: Daily updates ensure that leadership can respond to issues quickly, reducing the risk of problems going unnoticed.
- Ease of Use: With intuitive interfaces, SDS makes it easy for new team members to learn and understand the system, streamlining onboarding and operations.
- Cost Savings: By identifying inefficiencies and optimizing purchasing, SDS helps communities save money without sacrificing quality.
The Future of Technology in Senior Living Dining
The use of technology in senior living dining management is the future. SDS’s suite of tools makes managing food services more efficient, transparent, and cost-effective, benefiting both community leadership and residents. By offering detailed insights into finance, purchasing, culinary compliance, and standardization, SDS enables communities to deliver high-quality meals and experiences while maintaining financial health.
As technology continues to evolve, tools like the SDS dashboards will only become more powerful, helping communities adapt, grow, and thrive. Embracing these innovations is crucial for fostering growth and optimizing efficiencies in senior living.
