UP/h THE UNIT OF MEASUREMENT FOR PROGRAMMING AND CALIBRATING A PROFESSIONAL BAR
Professional Bar Stock, Equipment, and Resource Calibration
Knowing or forecasting the menu and volumes of the professional bar is the most important step in choosing and calibrating the bar stations and equipment that are suitable and in defining the various stocks as best as possible. When the establishment already exists, its history allows for a dive into the productions of previous months and years. It's important to extract a clear production volume from this data. If the bar does not yet exist and is still in the project phase, it's best to rely on forecasts. A properly executed business model will have taken care to establish volumes from several sources and tools. This research allows for a forecast with a certain acceptable margin of uncertainty.
These studies should result in a drink menu with the volumes and prices of the beverages. It also includes the workforce involved in production. All of this allows for the calibration of stations, equipment, machines, and various storages.
Example: A nightclub-type establishment on the Breton coast has just been purchased. Its new manager wants to redesign the bar layout. Past activity shows an average consumption of 4 drinks per person, including 1 beer. Its venue accommodates about 300 people on average. Customer turnover during a service can reach up to 500 people. Therefore, it's known that at most 2,000 drinks will need to be served each evening, with a peak in production around midnight. With this data and the configuration of the bar area, the number of production stations can be configured according to the production times and skills of the bartenders. It is therefore necessary to consider the menu and the complexity and production time of each product. This will help in developing the entire logic from the dishwashing area to stock requirements, to best meet high activity demands without over-calibrating production by increasing the number of serving stations and bartenders at the expense of other needs behind the professional bar.
Production Unit per Hour (UP/h)
In professional bar programming, we refer to UP/h, which stands for the production unit per hour. This is a unit of measurement dedicated to bar production. 1 UP/h is the speed required to complete one operation per glass/cup in one hour.
This unit of measurement applies to all human production actions with or without equipment and tools at the bar. For example, pouring a pint of draft beer, preparing a glass of soft drink and its bottle, washing glasses in a glass washer, etc. This value always considers the human factor of handling and transformation.
It is important to understand that this value always includes the human factor of information transmission, handling, transformation, and the production equipment factor.
For example, preparing a pint requires the bartender to:
1. Receive the order.
2. Grab a clean glass.
3. Rinse the glass in the glass rinser.
4. Pour the beer.
Place the full glass on the bar counter in front of the customer or on the service tray.
In the case of serving a pint from a classic draft column, we total a result of 225 UP/h because the average is 1 pint every 16 seconds.
If the draft system is well adjusted or on other systems, the bartender can leave the glass alone during filling. They can then serve more glasses. The UP/h therefore increases.
The example of draft beer remains very interesting because it shows that it is the machine factor that limits productivity. A long wait time is conditioned by the filling rate of the beer column and not by the bartender's execution skill.
This unit measures the capacity to evaluate the production of a bar or a bar project based on human and material resources. During bar design, knowing the production unit per hour value allows for quickly assessing if the production capacity aligns with the bar's service objectives. This provides the ability to plan, check, understand, and make human and material adjustments. To apply the data, there are average values. At BAR CIRCUS, we have internally developed calculators with weighted values.
The UP/h allows you to:
- Identify the strengths and weaknesses of a bar.
- Check the bar's output volume capacity.
- Check the turnover of glassware and raw material stocks during service.
- Assess human resources.
- Adjust the ranges and quantities of equipment.
- Assist in making global operational and strategic choices for the bar service.
The major advantage of the production per hour measurement unit UP/h lies in considering both human and machine factors for production by units common to all actions at the bar. Because a professional bar never produces a single product, the main strength of this calculation tool is to combine all productions into a single unit, making the analytical reading of the bar very clear.
The 6 Factors Modulating the Calibration of the Professional Bar
The values of UP/h (unit of production per hour) cannot be considered without a margin of tolerance. Six factors modulating this margin need to be taken into account:
- The staff and their skills.
- The stock and its volume and rotation capacity.
- Temporal variations in production.
- The space and organization of workstations.
- The quality and level of production complexity.
- The distribution of product orders by category.
The staff and their skills:
Depending on the skills of the staff and the speed of task execution, the values of the UP/h are modified. It is therefore essential to consider this parameter and adjust the UP/h to be as close as possible to the actual people working at the bar.
The stock and its volume and rotation capacity:
When calculating the UP/h, one must ensure that stock rotation is sufficient for real-time production.
Temporal variations in production:
The UP/h helps determine production units over a period of time. Since an establishment does not have the same production in terms of volume and variety depending on the time of day, day of the week, or season, it is beneficial to divide shifts into several time slots, which better manages production units.
The space and organization of workstations:
One must study any exception or organizational flaw in the space that reduces the UP/h values.
The quality of production:
Because sending out low-quality coffees and barista coffees or basic cocktails and mixologist cocktails does not require the same investment in skills, storage, setup, and preparation time, this has a significant influence on the UP/h.
The distribution of product orders by category:
It is known that the narrower the production menu is, meaning less diversity of production at the bar, the higher the UP/h values. Conversely, the wider the production range at the bar, the more the UP/h decreases because the complexity of production, organization of equipment, and space increases production times.
Calibrations by Workstation at the Bar
The stainless steel bar unit is made up of a series of specific workstations, the most common of which are dishwashing stations, cash registers, cocktails, lemonades and juices, coffee, beer, etc. For each station, we offer calibration values based on volumes. Of course, these values should be used with caution as the variations can be significant depending on the possible differences in the main calibration factors of the bar discussed earlier. Find all these values in our publications.
