Brookdale Senior Living has 20 years of experience in resolving the day-to-day challenges that can arise in food service, dining, and hospitality. Now the company has found a solution to one more challenge: How to tap into all that institutional memory while on the go.
ALFA 2013 Best of the Best Award Winner
Brookdale’s new Hospitality IQ is a mobile app that works on any iPhone, iPad, or similar device. It provides instant access to a full range of solutions to common and not-so-common operational challenges based on real-life cases that Brookdale has amassed over the years in its extensive knowledge management database.
“All of these regionals and folks in the field out there are always looking for answers to common dining and hospitality issues,” says Joska Hajdu, senior vice president of dining services. “Most could only think of two or three or four solutions for any given issue, whereas when we looked collectively at what we had in 20 years of action plan building and everybody’s brain power, we probably had two dozen solutions for every problem.”
The mobile app is very intuitive. If a manager encounters problems with food temperature, for example, the user would click on “food” and then on “temperature” to find a range of potential causes and solutions. Other areas addressed by Hospitality IQ include resident experience, menus, dining room management, staff training, cost management, and so on.
The new app has proved immensely helpful for giving managers access to the best strategies for solving problems they encounter while in the field. “It can literally just be while they’re walking around the community, and they’re noticing a particular issue,” says Hajdu. “Before they start giving an answer, they’ll click on that [topic] and they’ll get everything that we ever have encountered over 20 years right at their fingertips.”
Hajdu adds: “The responsiveness has been great because they’re like, ‘I would not have thought this myself.’”
Brookdale’s knowledge database is continually updated as new challenges, and strategies, arise.
The above best practice was recognized as an ALFA 2013 Best of the Best Award winner. Do you have a best practice, product, service or solution at your community or company that is advancing excellence in senior living? The Call for Nominations for the ALFA 2014 Best of the Best Awards will begin in October. Visit ALFA.org/bestofthebest to read more best practices.
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