ARTICLES AND UPDATES
Additional Information
Aged Care Genie allows you to record both the Nutritional Value for all ingredients in a Menu Item as well as the total amounts of Vegetables, Fruit, Grain, Protein, Milk & Dairy depending on the serving size. Menu Items can also be identified as suitable for Coeliac/Gluten Free, Diabetic, Halal, Kosher, Vegetarian and Vegan residents.
Daily Intake Ranges
Each Resident can either (a) have a tailored set of Daily Intake Ranges for both Nutritional Values and Food Groups, or (b) use the Universal/Standard set of Daily Intake Ranges suitable for the “average” resident.
Resident Menu Planner
From the 28 Day Menu Planner, selection of Menu Items is quick and efficient. As Menu Items are selected, the Average Daily Intake Range for Nutritional Values is updated and an Alert shows when the resident is “out of range” during the 28 Day cycle, with the Alert showing whether the resident is receiving too little/too much of Sodium, for example, or not enough Fruit.
Protection against serving inappropriate meals to residents with allergies is essential. Aged Care Genie will simply not allow you to select, for a resident, a Menu Item containing ingredient the resident is recorded as allergic to. Any time a new ingredient is added to an existing Menu Item, a 100% sweep of all residents with allergies is conducted and if any contradiction is found, the Menu Item concerned is removed from the resident’s Menu Planner and a follow-up alert email sent notifying the Care Manager. Similarly, if a resident has a new Allergy added to their record on Aged Care Genie, the resident’s existing Menu Planner is checked for any contradictions.
Any time a Menu Item is added, or removed, from a resident’s Menu Planner a record of the change (and who made the change) is added to the resident’s Menu Planner Change History.
Resident’s Food Diary
When a resident is identified as loosing weight, or has a nutrition-related issue, you can create a new Food Diary. This allows staff to record how much of each meal is actually consumed by the resident over a period of 5-14 days. On completion of the Food Diary, your Nutritional Advisor can review details of the resident’s consumption and make recommendations.
Aged Care Genie is the information system you need to manage and deliver the best possible catering service to your residents, with full food costings and ordering functionality to ensure you are getting the best possible deals from your food suppliers.
Reduce food costs, get the refunds you're entitled to!
- Monitoring – and staying on top of – your requests for refunds due to you from your suppliers, can be a time-consuming business. Failure to do so is simply money down the drain and in the current Covid environment, protecting your cash has never been so important for your business.
At Genie, we have added a new Refunds Centre. This has been specifically designed to allow you to:
- View details of all Credit Note requests sent via Genie to your suppliers
- Easily monitor the status of such requests (whether you have received the Credit refund or not)
- Also view details of all Discrepancy emails sent to your supplier when you have declined to pay the delivery price because of unauthorised price increases
Genie now automatically creates and sends Credit Note requests, as well as Discrepancy emails, to your suppliers without further action by you.
Since the recent introduction of Genie’s Refunds Centre, the response from Genie users has been overwhelmingly positive, with a typical comment from Flavours Catering & Events in Sydney:
“We’ve been loyal clients of Hospitality Genie for about 3 years now and have overhauled all of our purchasing processes into one streamlined platform. The Refund Centre is a new invaluable tool to help refine our reconciliation process by having all of our requests for credits in one handy area that we can keep track of, so that we are able to maximize our refunds.”
Genie’s new Refunds Centre is available now on all versions of Hospitality Genie and will greatly assist you in getting full value for all your purchase dollars.
Controlled Ordering with Requisition Lists
Ordering from your suppliers shouldn’t be a time-wasting chore, especially when you are placing the same orders with a supplier week after week, with only a few changes each time.
Hospitality & Aged Care Genie has recently updated its Requisition Lists function which allows you to save details of stock you usually order repeatedly from the same supplier, and after making any changes to the quantities required, send the new order to the supplier in a matter of seconds.
The benefits of using requisition lists are
1. Huge savings in time for staff involved in ordering particularly in busy kitchens and catering businesses
2. Significant increases in overall efficiency and productivity
3. Group stock items required for your current menu plan and eliminate unnecessary ‘other stock’ orders and waste.
During the current Covid business environment, any such savings in staff time and increases in productivity have got to be welcomed by any business.
Setting up a Requisition List is easy and can be done by selecting the Stock Items to be included. The Requisition List is then saved and can be used time and time again in the future.
Genie’s enhanced Requisition Lists will greatly assist you in getting full value for all your purchase dollars.
Supporting Nutrition in Aged Care
How paperless catering systems can help provide optimal nutrition care.
Good food and correct nutrition are essential ingredients for the physical, social and emotional wellbeing of our elderly in residential aged care.
Yet, despite the best efforts of providers, the Aged Care Royal Commission has estimated that between 22 and 50 per cent of aged care residents are malnourished. It’s clear that the management of nutrition intake in aged care is a complex task that requires more investment.
Currently, Aged Care Quality Standard 4(f) only goes as far as “where meals are provided, they are varied and of suitable quality and quantity”. The Aged Care Royal Commission outcomes are expected to take food service to a new level, with their statement: “nutrition care, food services and hydration…..must include a system to monitor nutrition care and take action when necessary”. In other words, meals must be tailored to meet the resident’s current requirements, in terms of
- meeting their recommended daily nutritional intake;·
- ensuring that the serving size is tailored to the resident;·
- on plating up, it contains the correct amounts of the specified food groups;
- and · alerting the care manager and recording follow up actions should there be any exceptions.
Strengthening food and nutrition systems for our elderly is the cornerstone for their health and overall wellbeing. While there are agreed standard ranges for protein, sodium and so on for all age groups including the elderly, it is essential these ranges can be amended for the individual resident depending on their clinical requirements.
A recent report by Dieticians Australia into the value of correct nutrition in aged care, estimated a staggering $80 million per year could be saved if providers invested more in catering to the nutrition requirements of the people in their care, rather than dealing with the clinical cost resulting from insufficient nutrition.
While your resident’s nutritional needs are assessed by nutritionists, how does your care manager know with absolute certainty that the resident’s nutrition care is being provided for, and how is this being monitored?
Nutrition is everyone’s business. Clinical assessment experts, chefs preparing the daily meal service, the care staff aiding during meal service, all have a responsibility to their residents for the food being prepared, served and consumed.
Programs, such as the National Nutrition Policy, are being designed to provide greater levels of access and funding for allied health experts, training to assist other workers in nutrition care, and funding for assistive technology programs.
While the policy is worked out, how will this work in practical terms—from the dietician to the dining table?
Catering systems must be designed to help aged care operators manage resident’s meal service and their specific nutrition requirements. They must be able to provide kitchen staff the correct recipes and ingredients to ensure consistency for the day’s meal service, quantity required and serving sizes for residents while, at the same time, monitoring nutrition intake.
Paperless catering systems are needed now more than ever, to record and report on critical matters such as resident’s meal preferences, nutrition intake, and ensuring that meal selection is precluded when a resident’s allergies are taken into account.
A paperless catering system can link nutrition values to each recipe. As the resident selects their meals, the nutritional value is added to their Meal Service Record. Over the course of their weekly meal service, the total nutritional values are recorded, and any exceptions trigger automated alerts to care managers. Follow up actions are monitored until the issues are resolved.
Additionally, Resident Nutrition Reports should be fully automated to reduce the monitoring workload of care managers, and to assist them to guarantee that remedial actions are met when required. Nobody should ever fall between the cracks.
Aged Care Genie has been designed to do all of the above. It assists care managers and catering staff to manage the daily meal service, monitor nutrition intake and react when necessary—supporting you to provide quality care.
Compliance in the Kitchen
Many businesses today are struggling to meet statutory reporting requirements – whether it’s a commercial kitchen having to prove that daily recording of temperatures has actually happened, or an issue arises and you have to prove remedial action has been taken, and has been dealt with satisfactorily.
Genies Workflow & Compliance system is designed to ensure that daily, repetitive tasks are properly completed and the outcome recorded. Workflows are stored on Genie, each containing any number of tasks, and can be set to run every day, weekly or monthly.
Repetitive workflows can be assigned to the same staff member, or assigned at the beginning of each working day.
Staff use Genie to record completion of their assigned tasks(with detailed instructions available if required for each task) – and at any point during the day, management can monitor the completion of Workflows & Tasks as they occur, and reallocate staff resources where necessary.
Of course the real issue nowadays is ensuring that when an issue or problem arises during a Task, it is dealt with properly, especially when you have a change of shift or use agency staff. For each Task, by creating a “Follow Up Action” record on Genie, you can identify exactly at any point in time who is responsible for ensuring the problem is dealt with, and record the solution or outcome.
Selected management can receive daily/weekly reports on outstanding or overdue Follow Up Actions. Additionally KPI’s can be set and monitored for Workflow, Task and Follow Up Action completion rates.
Genies Workflow and compliance system is available now as an independent system suitable for any business, or as an integrated module within Genies Hospitality and Aged Care systems.
Account for every $ you spend
Post COVID-19, there is no doubt that that the business environment will be tough for many in the hospitality and catering trades, with reduced initial cash flows and higher costs to deal with.
Anticipating all this, we have been busy upgrading parts of our Hospitality & Aged Care Genie systems to enable your management to make better use of the rich reporting facilities included with Genie.
Monitoring of food costs and achieving supplier compliance in terms of delivering food stock at agreed prices will probably be never be as so crucial to the survival of your business as in the next few months, when social distancing and business opening restrictions are eased.
Genie’s existing suite of reports is now being modified so that the really valuable reports are no longer “on demand”, but rather will be automatically sent to you on specified days and at the end of each month. These reports will now arrive in your email inbox automatically, giving you the essential data you need to effectively manage your food costs.
Examples of these newly automated reports include:
- Detailed outcomes of deliveries where suppliers have increased prices over order prices, by individual Stock Item and by Supplier – sent weekly on every Wednesday covering the week before
- Details of all Price Increases during the past 30 days – sent monthly
Additionally, you will now be able to set a number of KPIs for price change outcomes when suppliers deliver stock items at prices higher than what was ordered at. Setting KPI targets for paying/not paying higher delivery prices, and viewing on a weekly basis how these targets are being met or not, can only assist you to manage food costs and increase profitability.
Additional reports using Artificial Intelligence are also under development in order to assist you in keeping food costs to a minimum. In the meantime, if you have any ideas or suggestions on how you would like to “mine” or use your food purchasing data stored on Genie and include it in a new report, we would like to hear from you!
The aim of using the cloud-based Hospitality And Aged Genie systems is quite simple – fully account for every $ you spend on your food purchases whilst ensuring you have an accurate and profit-enhancing stock control system.
Remember, Genie is fully customisable to the needs of your business.
Health Services Australia - Spring 2020
IS IT POSSIBLE TO REDUCE FOOD COSTS AS WELL AS MAINTAIN QUALITY?
In challenging times, every cost needs to be investigated.
To survive and prosper during times of crisis, such as COVID-19, every cost of an age services business’ operations needs the strictest financial controls.
Real-time management reporting on spending costs, transparency on expenditure and proper budgeting, has never been so important as it is now.
Expenditure on catering and food is one significant cost that can be better managed. Providing the highest quality meals possible on a strict budget requires accurate menu costing and portion control.
Most organisations have a clearly defined cap on costs per day and per week or even per recipe, allowing for seasonal adjustments, which can be impacted by small advances in cost over time.
A common issue with catering suppliers is the practise of delivering food stock at prices higher than the order price.
Over time, minor or incremental overcharging can result in significantly inflated food costs—with a delay between price increases and the purchaser becoming aware of the problem. It is important to identify which suppliers are overcharging and address the issue as quickly as possible, by securing fixed price arrangements, or finding alternative suppliers. However, management of pricing will be an ongoing requirement, no matter the supplier.
Transparency across the business is also important. Those responsible for food services, from the Chef to the Chief Executive Office or Chief Financial Controller, should be aware of food costs and any food waste or food supply issues, with protocols in place to address problems that may arise.
While these measures may seem minor, it can mean significant savings to aged care operators.
Aged Care Genie offers businesses within the age services industry the opportunity to take control of their food costs. They recently assisted a 75-bed aged care facility to reduce their annual food bill by more than 20 per cent. The facility maintained the quality of their meals, and also improved nutrition and variety.
Aged Care Genie is specifically developed for the age services industry, and offers training and ongoing support to users of the system.
It can help businesses manage their food costs by:
• Identifying and eliminating overcharging
• Holding suppliers to fixed price commitments
• Helping to cost menus and updating costs based on price
changes
• Identifying overordering and reducing waste
• Providing management reports at set intervals
Deborah Carney, Chef at Figtree Aged Care, is happy to be on board: “Since working with the Genie program, ordering has been simplified. I’m aware of my spending and menu costs and have reduced my waste by nearly 50 per cent. Stocktakes show me what I should have in stock at the end of each month and highlights any discrepancies. We have saved thousands of dollars by carefully choosing and costing our menu items, controlling portion sizes and negotiating with suppliers for the best produce at the best price.”
At the same facility, a resident named Sam wrote to Deborah to let her know how much they enjoyed her meals: “Dear Deborah, Just want you to know how much I enjoy the meals here. I don’t eat red meat but there is always a wonderful alternative for me, either vegetarian choice or chicken and fish. I particularly love the vegetarian lasagne and the chicken tagine, but all the other meals are beautiful. Thank you so much.”
Saving on food costs doesn’t need to mean poor food choices, it’s really about good management. (Fusion Magazine August 2020- Leading Aged Care Association)
Deborah Carney, Chef at Figtree Aged Care, says they have saved thousands by managing food costs.
Reduce your food Costs
Hospitality Genie is in use throughout the Hospitality and Aged Care industries in Australia and throughout Asia.
When the Coronavirus crisis is over, many Hospitality venues who survive, will undoubtedly be in a tough business environment.
Getting food purchase costs under control will be a significant part of these business’s plans to recover and prosper. It is surprising however how many businesses have for years allowed their suppliers to get away with delivering food stock at prices higher than the order price.
The good news for Hospitality Genie users is that the system works with you pro-actively, to achieve supplier compliance and stop the industry-wide practice of suppliers getting away with effectively charging whatever they want. Even small price increases on delivery, over a long period, make for unnecessary huge costs which no business even in a “normal” operating environment can afford.
2021 is definitely shaping up as a year where only the most cost-efficient businesses will survive.
Check out this real-life case study for a Sydney-based restaurant/cafe business with 5 separate venues (started off with 1 venue using Hospitality Genie, then in recent months another 4 venues signed up to use Hospitality Genie).
In the 6 months previous to 1 February 2020, food stock for these venues was ordered at $41,304 per month, and delivered by suppliers who invoiced for and were paid $50,973 – a 23% increase. But in the 2 months prior to 1 February, the venues started to automatically receive monthly reports from Hospitality Genie highlighting every stock item delivered – at a price higher than the order price. The aim of the reports was to identify suppliers who were over-charging, and, getting the venues to stop accepting and paying the higher prices.
Then, on 1 February 2020, the business owner, using Hospitality Genie, instituted strict Fixed Price Contracts for all the venue’s suppliers.
Since then, 100% of food stocks delivered have been paid for at exactly the order price, irrespective of the price the supplier invoiced for.
Over 12 months that equates to a $19,000 potential cash saving.
Hospitality Genie can also make significant savings elsewhere – reducing stock losses, accurate portion pricing and so much more.
