Week 2 - The Ins and Outs of KU Dining

My second week at KU was spent visiting with all of the department heads under KU dining learning about how they contribute and fit into the big picture. Each day I met with someone new and learned more and more about the behind the scenes aspects of a food service operation.

June 14
Today I got to tour all of the dining facilities that are open for the summer on campus with Alicia Stultz, the Assistant Director for Retail Dining. Alicia introduced me to the managers of each dining facility and I got to talk with them briefly about how each of their individual operations work. Getting to physically see some of the other dining centers help clear up some of the questions I had about the differences between residential and retail dining on campus. For instance I got to see how the self-branded concepts are worked into the retail centers and how they differ from the menus that residential dining centers serve. The self-branded concepts require the same products day after day while residential meals rotate on a 5 week menu cycle where there are new meal items practically every day.
While walking with Alicia I also got to hear about some of the historical aspects of the KU campus. I’m really excited to go check out the Natural History Museum that KU has I hear there are all sorts of interesting bits of history from live snakes to important literature insides its walls. One thing I also ended up speaking to Alicia about was how I find it interesting that NACUFS recruits Dietetics undergraduates as interns because thus far this internship seems much more geared towards hospitality and management. Alicia empathized with this sentiment of mine because she had a similar revelation while teaching a foodservice management class to both HTM and dietetics students. She noticed that dietetics students tended to see things mainly in black and white, as compared to the hospitality students who were able to see the gray area in between. I think it is valuable to gain a better perspective on the “gray area” when in a management position because things are not always clear cut. One has to learn to be flexible and innovative in an environment that is constantly evolving.
Therefore, I think it was especially fortunate for me to have obtained this internship position because it will help fill in the gaps that may occur during my undergraduate education, specifically pertaining to foodservice and management skills. In addition it will help further develop my interpersonal relationship (or people) and customer service skills in that I will be interacting with faculty, staff, and customers on a daily basis.

June 15
This Tuesday I met with Craig Josling, the Procurement Officer and Karen Cross the Meal Plan Administrator.
One of the main things that Craig and I spoke about was the benefits of using a prime vendor, in KU’s case that is Sysco. Craig emphasized how sourcing from one location saves time and money and how Sysco has special rewards programs for being timely and efficient. Sysco requires that we purchase 70% or more of our inventory from them, but they offer incentives like the drop incentive which requires that we meet a minimum drop size for each delivery and reduce the number of stops or deliveries that Sysco has to make per time period. It requires more effort on our end to plan ahead and combine drops but in the end we get a back end payment of up to 1% of whatever we purchased during the year if we decrease the number of drops, which can amount to a lot.
After meeting with Craig I moved over to the cubicle next to his to speak with Karen Cross about what she does under KU Dining, which I found involves meal card activation, any billing for meals, and maintaining and trouble shooting for the Micros and CS Gold systems that track all meal transactions. Karen also helped explain how the different meal plans that KU offers work. All on-campus residents with housing contracts are required to have a meal plan, if you live in dorm, then you have a meal plan. When you sign a housing contract the default meal plan is the 320/320 plan, meaning you get 320 meals for the year to use in the residential dining facilities and 320 dollars per year to use in all of the retail facilities as well as 6 guest passes per year. However, this can be upgraded if necessary. It seemed that the most difficult part of choosing a meal plan was avoiding waste because dining center meals and guess passes that are not used are forfeited at the end of the semester. However, Beak’em bucks, which is just cash added to your card like a debt card, and KU Cuisine Cash (for retail use) rolls over from semester to semester. If you run out of meals before the end of the semester you can add more, 10 meals for 77$. Here is the meal plan break down as far as I understand it:




“Dining Center Meals” – can be used at any of the Residence Hall All-You-Care-To-Eat Facilities: Ekdahl, Oliver, GSP. There is no limit to the number of times the Dining Center Meals can be used in one day. KU card is non-transferable, meaning meals cannot be shared, that’s what Guest Passes or KU Cuisine Cash are for.
“KU Cuisine Cash”- is a value added system that acts like a debit card. Any KU cash not spent during the fall semester will roll over to the spring semester.
Beak ‘Em Bucks” – is a declining balance account that is automatically set up for you when the KU card is issued. Money must be added to this account in order to use it. They can be used for food purchases, printing, photocopying, and laundry on campus.
“Guest Passes”- are assigned to the KU card when you sign up for a housing contract and select a meal plan. Half of the guest passes are available each semester and must be used by the end of the semester, they do not roll over. They can be used at any of the Residential Dining facilities.

KU is currently in the process of revamping their meal plans in order to make them more straight forward and easy to understand. Most of the reformatting has to do with renaming the plans so that there as less numbers involved with the hope of decreasing confusion.

June 17

At 5 a.m. this lovely early morning I met up with Judy Todd and Chris Nichols to observe receiving, storeroom operations, and the ordering process. After working with several procurement personnel I found that purchasing, ordering, and receiving is a game of keeping track of numbers. Whether it is cost of goods, how many units of goods we have in inventory, or how much of a good needs to be ordered, Craig, Chris, and Judy deal with numbers all day long. While working with Chris and Judy I learned about inventory and how important it is for it to be as accurate as possible at all times for reasons like reducing waste and determining how much of a product needs to be ordered. We also went over several key parts of the purchasing, ordering, and forecasting process. First we talked about acutals, which are a count of how much of a menu item was prepared, consumed, and discarded. The data they provide are crucial for forecasting and determining whether a menu item was a success of failure. The next part of the ordering process after actual are entered into the system is forming and order scheduler. The order scheduler is created from service menus in CBOARD, the menu management system, using forecasted numbers. It tells you which items are needed for a particular day and in what quantities they are needed. An order scheduler also includes non-menu or parstock items, which are everyday use items such as condiments and beverages. Parstock orders are determined by customer count (per every 1,000^th person). Orders are placed by the Procurement Supervisor, in this case Chris Nichols, using the CBOARD system. Every day Chris will consult his order scheduler to see what needs to be purchased for the day. Then he takes current inventory into account to ensure that we do not order more of what we already have. He will also consult with production supervisors to see if any additional items are needed due to alteration of menu items etc. Then he will manually create a purchase order by retrieving data from the CBOARD system. Then a purchase order is printed, which is just a record of what we ordered. When the order comes in the vendor provides us with an invoice, a list of what the vendor brought/ what we received. Invoices and purchasing orders are reviewed on a regular basis by each individual venue, the finance department, and the accounting department to ensure that we are not paying for things we didn’t receive and vice versa. Starting this fiscal year KU Dining will be using a new digital system to review purchase orders and invoices called Image Now

June 18

Today was jam packed. First I met with Lisa Englebrecht at the Union to talk about KUDS financials. Then I journeyed up the stairs to meet with Shant Thomas in Marketing to learn about how KU Dining has worked with the Marketing Department to develop the Showtime program. From Lisa I discovered that KU Dining is a self-sponsoring organization that supplies its own budget ever since its merger with the Kansas Memorial Union. It gets the majority of its revenue from the meal plans that students purchase. We also spoke about the nity gritty details of finance like flash reports which give a general idea where everyone is at budget wise. The flash report contains a profit loss statement, sales by unit, food cost, labor cost, and general expenses. Then we broke down what each part of the flash report means. We started with food and labor expenses which can be manipulated by unit managers to their advantage by watching profit loss, altering menus to fit the budget, practicing good planning (drop incentive, if pay invoices on time get a percentage back as well). Then we talked about general costs which include controllable costs and uncontrollable costs. Controllable costs are things like paper plates where if you’re not satisfied with the price or quality of the product you can find another vendor with a similar product. Uncontrollable expenses are things like utilities, over head that the university charges, and workers compensation. Last we talked about depreciation expenses. The idea behind this is to try to pay off an item before it depreciates. For instance, if you renovate a building you will want to finish paying the bill for the first renovation before you renovate it again. Who would have known that so much must be taken into consideration when determining the budget!
For the rest of the afternoon I met with Shant all the way in the very top most corner of the Union building. The marketing department does most of the advertising for dining services whether it be for a special event or monotony breaker dinner like the ones we have at Mrs. E’s or a pamphlet on nutrition. Some examples of what the marketing and graphic design departments have done for KU Dining recently would be the beautiful 2010-11 Dining Guide and the Better Bites pamphlet. Marketing doesn’t just do advertising via print media; they can also convey media online etc. One of the new media outlets that Marketing is trying to utilize is facebook. At Virginia Tech we offered additional meal plan money or various coupons usable throughout the community for taking surveys. All of this was initially conducted through listserv emails but was recently moved onto facebook this year. I think it was very successful and should definitely be initiated at KU.