January 17, Leave a comment. October 12, Leave a comment. July 25, Leave a comment. Rockwell Ave. December 30, Leave a comment. But staffing up is costing a little more than expected. December 14, Leave a comment. November 16, Leave a comment. Tagged with: OKC Zaxby's. June 29, Leave a comment. Slim Chickens will open its fourth restaurant in the Oklahoma City metro on July 20, taking up a small property on the Northwest Expressway between the former Homeland store and LifeChurch.
Tagged with: Molly M. Fleming Zaxby's. December 3, Leave a comment. Georgia-based franchisee Sterling Coleman has signed Zaxby's largest single agreement, which will bring 28 fast-casual chicken restaurants to the Oklahoma City metro area over the next five to seven years.
October 9, Leave a comment. The growing Zaxby's restaurant chain will enter Oklahoma with an eatery along Tulsa's busy 71st Street retail corridor. Not Registered?
Create an account Already registered? Login Forgotten your password? Reset Password. So it was decided! I began working in operations at Hooters in Kansas City, Missouri, back in and I just fell in love with the pace. It was a place where there was a lot going on, a lot of interaction between the guests, the kitchen, and the wait staff and it was really great energy.
From there I started to learn and cycle through other roles in the organization and became a trainer and then field training and then helping other restaurants with their training programs. Then I started opening restaurants on behalf of Hooters all over the world and was offered a role in corporate training in Atlanta in to lead openings for the company at that time.
I learned a lot about the business but also learned the importance of being on a cross-functional team. Corporate training is what I came to Atlanta for but I also worked in Quality Assurance going out and auditing plants. I did that for about five years and the phone rang and it was Focus Brands.
So I moved over to Focus Brands and back in really just dug into supply chain for Carvel, learned a great deal about dairy management, risk management, and hedging commodities, and how to really be a leader in supply chain. We want to protect our franchise margins the best we can.
It was with Focus Brands that I really started to apply all of those key learnings along with servant leadership. That journey taught me quite a bit about the industry and about what a level three and level four class supply chain could look like. I was there for five years and about halfway through, Cinnabon needed some support so I took on that brand as well.
I was leading supply chain for the Carvel and Cinnabon brands, as well as supporting some of the non-traditional and co-branding efforts, which was a ton of fun to do and I got to see both sides of those brands and work closely with other brand Supply Chain leaders. Then ultimately in , Zaxby's called me. They were developing a new role and wanted to see if I had any interest.
I accepted the position then and moved to Athens. Then an opportunity again came up in purchasing here and that was something that I really missed. Today, I'm the Senior Director of Purchasing for Zaxby's Franchising and we've got a team of six talented individuals responsible for about million dollars in annual non-poultry spend. It's just an amazing place to be and work and thrive, especially during these times.
How has your job changed and what do you think is next in all this craziness? GN: You know it's a similar story for a lot of my peers in the industry. Our business was down 35, 40 percent for a short time. Then for us, about three weeks into COVID, it's was like hanging on to a rocket ship taking off into space. The role has definitely changed because there are multiple new challenges being presented every single day. Now, some of those issues go up a few rungs, to secondary and tertiary suppliers to your manufacturers that are having issues getting labor and ingredients.
So, we've had to have a little bit of grace, during this time with manufacturers, and with distributor partners. Ultimately, it comes down to the relationships that we have in place, and still today it's all about the relationships. That played a big role in helping us not only get through COVID but coming out of it we were able to learn a great deal about our vendors and who was there with us and who maybe had struggled and needed a little bit more support or maybe needed us to identify a second source of product.
Technology really played a big role in how we were able to manage. First with managing what was going on, because none of us knew what to expect. Then, it was how were we going to manage to go forward? Well, in order to understand that, you have to know where you are.
So we were able to use the technology platforms we had in place and quickly see inventory distribution centers, ordering patterns, purchase history, inbound purchase orders, and we were able to create and share reports with our key supply partners. So in addition to our daily performance reports along with a snapshot of what their inventory looked like at each one of our centers with history and purchase order records.
That was an additional set of eyes looking at things in the background. I think that information sharing really helped keep everything in check. The next part of that was keeping up with shifts in the consumer demand cycle; off-premise dining, new prototype buildings, things that we have to think about now for the next iteration of our brand because a lot of those consumer behaviors that were present early during COVID are now things that consumers don't want to give up, like off-premise dining, ordering, third party delivery.
Those things are here to stay in my mind. So how do we as brands make that experience live up to the same experience it would have been dining with us? GN: Yes, we're new to it actually, we onboarded our tech platform ArrowStream a few years ago. So we haven't really had these tools very long.
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