Articles from SmartSense by Digi

SmartSense's communication manager improves team productivity by getting each update to the right people and keeping a record that it arrived. Policy changes, new procedures, and schedule updates still reach employees who missed the meeting, so the next shift is not left guessing. Think about the last time something went wrong at your location because someone did not get the message. A policy changed but the closing team was not told. A new cleaning procedure was announced but two employees were off that day and missed the meeting. A manager sent out a schedule update but could not be sure who actually saw it. These are not dramatic failures. They are the quiet, daily frictions that accumulate across a shift-based workforce and show up as inconsistent execution, repeated mistakes, and …

There is a payroll problem hiding in plain sight at most restaurants and retail businesses, and it does not show up as a line item on any report. It lives in the gap between when employees are scheduled to work and when they actually start working. In the lunch break that runs 40 minutes instead of 30. In the friend who clocks in for a coworker who is running late. In the early clock-out that nobody catches because the manager was pulled away to deal with something else. These are not dramatic theft events. They are small, quiet, daily occurrences that individually feel insignificant. But at scale, across a team of 20 or 30 employees, across 52 weeks, they add up to something that hits the P&L in a real and measurable way. The American Payroll Association estimates that buddy punching …

Brand Note: This article was originally published when our Digital Food Safety solution was offered under the Jolt brand. Jolt is now part of SmartSense by Digi. The testimonials below reflect the customer's experience with the Jolt product, which is now delivered and supported under the SmartSense name Every restaurant has a bad stretch. A run of poor reviews. A health inspection that did not go the way you hoped. A season where revenue dropped and you could not quite put your finger on why. When you are in the middle of it, the temptation is to look for a big, dramatic fix. New menu. New marketing. A fresh coat of paint on the dining room. But most of the time, the problem is not dramatic at all. It is operational. It is the small things that slipped, compounded over weeks and months, …

"Now we have real-time visibility with SmartSense, so the discovery is done. SmartSense gives us the data to choose a clear direction, and we're able to act faster, the right way." -- Jonathon McGuire, Owner/Operator of 19 McDonald's locations in Tennessee, Leader of the McDonald's Restaurant Technology Board This story describes the customer's experience with Jolt, which SmartSense acquired in 2025. Running one restaurant is hard. Running 19 is a different challenge entirely. When you have a single location, you can walk through the door and know within minutes whether things are going well. You can read the room, check the logs, talk to your team, and get a feel for where attention is needed. That kind of hands-on oversight is imperfect, but it works at small scale. When you have 19 …

Food safety is not a bureaucratic formality devoid of impact in the real world. The CDC estimates about 48 million illnesses and about 3,000 deaths from foodborne illness each year. Every organization that touches the food supply chain carries a share of that responsibility, from the farmer who grows the produce to the restaurant that plates it. The stages of that chain are numerous: growing, processing, packaging, labeling, distributing, storing, preparing, selling, and serving. At each stage, food products face varying levels of risk. And at each stage, the federal government has something to say about it. This guide traces the federal food safety laws that have defined the last century of American food regulation, explains why each one exists, and brings you current on the significant …

SmartSense helps assisted living facilities operate efficiently by keeping medication schedules, compliance checks, shift handoffs, and safety tasks visible to the staff on duty. Caregivers can see what is due and what is finished, which protects the calm residents feel even when the building is short on people. Walk into a well-run assisted living facility and what you notice first is the atmosphere. Residents are calm. Staff are present but not frantic. Things seem to happen when they are supposed to happen. It feels less like an institution and more like a home. What you do not see is the operational complexity underneath that calm. Medication schedules for dozens of residents with different needs. Compliance checklists that regulators will scrutinize. Shift handoffs where critical …