The performance of your restaurant technology plays a large role in the success of your operations. After all, a winning restaurant manages to optimize their food and labor costs while providing the highest quality guest experience that keeps people coming back for more. Your tech stack is central to this formula. With the restaurant industry always in a state of flux, your technology needs to keep up. So what does the ideal back office technology ecosystem look like?
There is a natural impulse to consolidate. People love their smartphones because they combine communication and media consumption on one device. That impulse that sways us as consumers also impacts business decisions. That’s why a growing number of technology providers offer a suite of interconnected applications. Many businesses like this because it's convenient. While convenience should be factored into your restaurant technology investment strategy, so should the fact that your restaurant's technology needs are constantly changing.
Not exactly – at least, not always. There are arguments against consolidation. Ultimately, consolidating multiple systems from one provider often affects features, functionality, and performance. Here are some reasons why:
Some areas within the restaurant are so intertwined that consolidation is the only sensible answer. In these instances, no level of integration between disparate systems can achieve the level of operational efficiency you need to maximize your investment into that technology. The most prominent case is your boh-flo. What's your boh-flo? It's the combination of your back of house food and labor operations.
The two biggest cost centers at your restaurant are food and labor. In short, food and labor are your restaurant's operations. Restaurant success is achieved when food and labor operations (cost, efficiency, quality) are optimized. The two are directly correlated via sales forecasting and planning – if you’re selling more food, that means your restaurant is busier and you need more people to handle the rush.
When your restaurant can identify how much was spent on food and labor versus how much should have been spent, it can optimize costs. It becomes easier to identify these variances when the day-to-day understanding of labor and food costs is available in a single platform in a single version of the truth. When everyone is on the same page regarding food and labor operations, the restaurant wins.
That said, you want a quality HR and payroll system. You want a quality POS system, too. At the center of the stack is a food and labor operations platform that integrates seamlessly with all the best possible POS, HR and payroll, and accounting systems. This will ensure you have the best possible solutions for every area of your business.