When you manage dining services for a school system with nearly 200,000 students and some 250 school sites in an era of high fiscal stress, you have to be very efficient. That is the challenge faced by Mary Kate Harrison, food & nutrition services director for the Hillsborough County (FL) Schools, one of the country's ten largest districts.

Harrison is one of the new breed of school nutrition directors looking to meet the challenge of the times through a more rigorous, numbers-oriented approach to school foodservice, an approach that includes utilizing KPI (Key Performance Indicators) to evaluate the program, determine points of emphasis and gauge results in an objective, measurable way.

In the K-12 environment, KPI metrics include standard measures like food and labor cost, meals per labor hour and participation. But KPI based management is designed to go further, to drill down into those broad numbers, as well as into more arcane ones.

It requires sophisticated data gathering and analysis systems to work effectively, as well as a compatible database of comparable statistics against which they can be measured and benchmarked (for more on that, see the sidebar on p. 20). And, just as critically, it requires a savvy management acumen that can take advantage of the data to make effective and efficient changes in the program.

Making the Units Accountable

The KPI oriented approach at Hillsborough County went into high gear three years ago when Harrison decided her existing system couldn't meet the mounting challenges faced by her department.

“We'd gathered profit-loss statements for years from our schools and given them back information about how much money they had spent on food and labor, how much revenue they've brought in and so forth,” Harrison explains. “Then we would break it down into their cost per plate and either their profit or loss per plate. That was good information, but I felt it had to be more meaningful for employees to really be able to manage their programs because I think they were just looking at the numbers and saying, ‘Oh, I made money’ or ‘I lost money.’ But they didn't know how they got there, and they didn't know what to do about it if they needed to make changes.”

To make the numbers more useful, Hillsborough now has a “site progress report” (SPR) that “breaks down all those things that managers can do something about,” Harrison says. “With schools, there are certain things over which we don't have a lot of control. The school board decides what our salary line increase will be, how much we'll make and so forth. We wanted to make a point to our managers that even if there are variables that we can't control, we still have to create enough revenue to cover all of our costs.”

The SPRs provide site managers key data on revenues and expenses, along with individual site goals. The revenue metric centers around participation, which is further broken out to measure breakfast, lunch and a la carte separately. In the first year, each school site was given its own distinct, realistic goal individualized to its circumstances, historic performance and potential.

Incremental Expectations

“We looked at where each was and where we thought it could go for the next year based on the percent of their students that they weren't serving,” Harrison says. “The goal was to get numbers up where they realistically could be expected to go up.”

The expectations were incremental that first year — a program with 35% breakfast participation might have been expected to bump that to 38%, for example. “In that first year, we just wanted to get them used to having goals and to understand that they had to strive to meet those goals,” Harrison explains.

On the expense side, food cost was set as a percentage of revenue. Unlike participation, it was pegged to general criteria like school size rather than being based on individual school circumstances.

To make goals clearer and simpler to understand, the data on the SPRs are couched not only in percentage terms but in raw numbers. So, for example, a manager will be given not only the participation percentage that site needs to meet, but also specifically how many additional student customers are needed to hit the goals.

“And they really get that,” Harrison says. “While I think percentages are really meaningful and paint a good picture, when you're dealing one-on-one, serving kids through a line, it may be more useful to think in terms of ‘I need to serve 10 more kids today at breakfast’ than ‘I need to increase breakfast participation three percent.’”

Another effective enabler is a calculator application on the ordering program provided to each site that lets managers take better charge of procurement costs to stay in line with their expense goals. With the program, the manager is better able to tailor orders so that they meet the site's procurement cost goals.

“For example, they input so many cases of this and so many cases of that and it will tell you that you will spend, say, $1,800,” Harrison explains. “So, if they know they have to cut say, $34 a day, they can go back and make decisions: ‘Can we get away with one case of this?’ or ‘I really don't need that right now.’”

In this way, unit managers are empowered and encouraged to find the kind of hidden incremental cost savings that would be harder to ferret out with a heavy-handed top-down approach. The goals for each school, as well as the progress toward meeting them, are posted in each kitchen and are also gone over during each day's “power rally” staff meeting. Harrison says this kind of ongoing communication also has a positive effect, not only on managers but on employees.

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