As the Operation Manager for a large Texas school district, I am responsible for overseeing our large cook-chill site and central kitchen from food storage, preparation/cooking, to dispatch and serving of food daily at all of our schools district-wide. Thanks to remote temperature monitoring, we’ve abandoned manual recording of temperatures for our HACCP compliance and have been able to keep tighter control of our temperatures for all of our cold storage units and warmers. For years, this has helped cut costs and has freed up my staff to focus on other aspects of food safety and day-to-day tasks. But, I still had been searching for a more comprehensive system to help further reduce my overall operation and maintenance costs.
Recently we installed E-Control Systems’ IntelliSense wireless temperature monitoring system with FusionLive software and the Asset Manager Module. The system has afforded us a whole new level of cost cutting benefits for our School Operation. The Asset Manager has enabled us to more effectively keep track of our equipment, keeping tabs on manufacturer information, serial and model number, warranty status, repair costs, down-time, and parameters being monitored. It has also allowed us to anticipate breakdowns, schedule preventative maintenance, and take advantage of flexible reporting features such as dashboard view of the entire operation in a snapshot, executive summary reports, and tracks the main failures within the operation and the associated corrective actions for a closed-loop reporting system.
The real beauty of the system is that it is easy to use and affordable with a quick Return on Investment. In just the first 3 months, the cost cutting measures have saved us nearly 40% of the cost of the system and the system is on track to have paid for itself within 6 months. I would urge any school food service operation in need of a temperature monitoring system and cost-cutting opportunities to take a serious look at E-Control Systems solutions.