Posted by Walker Thompson on Mon, Aug 30, 2010 @ 09:56 AM
Is there something to reading the latest news on a Monday morning? Sitting back with a cup of coffee and your trusty Google Reader seems to set us in the mood for the work week. Great data comes not from just our application, but from others as well... Here are a few that piqued our interest...
What does it take to be a successful enterprise? Well, after reading about Panera Bread's top-100 fastest-growing enterprises perhaps you should ask them. Panera is one of only two restaurant concepts to make the 2010 list. Read more here...
The fast casual restaurant category accounted for estimated sales of $23 billion in 2010, up nearly 30 percent since 2006. According to the article, "restaurants in this market claim to combine the quality of family casual with the convenience of fast food. At $6–$12 per ticket, pricing falls between fast food and casual dining. Fast casual restaurants distinguish themselves from fast food through their modified table service, higher food quality, greater attention to healthful foods, and, in some cases, availability of beer and wine." Read more here...
Ever heard of a pop-up restaurant? You sit and served only what the chef prepares, but is this another trend or fad? Read more here...
We'll keep the list going... But if you find something of note or interesting to share, post a comment.
Posted by Jeff Schacher on Mon, Dec 14, 2009 @ 11:40 AM
Albert Einstein has a famous quote about making things simple.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler."
As a software company, we try very hard to live by that quote, but it's difficult. Our first product provided online employee scheduling for restaurants. When we spoke to operators, they usually had a labor scheduling module with their POS system, but instead they were often using Excel or paper and a pencil.
There was a failing, the ROI or return on investment of their time was not enough for them to justify using their POS scheduling module.
Our challenge was to build something as simple as an excel spreadsheet, but to also provide some more advanced functionality like online shift trades, time off requests, and just general features for improving communication among the staff.
We worked hard to build something simple that people would find useful and of course fast. We were successful. But in the software business, you seldom stop creating enhancments and new features. New clients make requests for this and that and it becomes more and more difficult to maintain the "simplicity" of your solution.
It's so easy for complexity to creep in when you start adding bells and whistles. Suddenly you need to write more documentation and are getting more support requests because those new things were just added and not enough thought went into the right way to add them.
Of course, you could always say "no". Believe it or not, we've benefitted many clients by not giving in to their request and found alternate ways for them to solve their problem, which proved simpler in the long run.
We have some exciting things happening in 2010, and it's going to be even tougher to stick to our guns. But we'll just keep repeating our mantra to ourselves. KISS (keep it simple stupid).
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Posted by Jeff Schacher on Tue, Jan 13, 2009 @ 02:15 PM
This is a follow up to my last post about the top 5 things that restaurants should be doing online. There are several good reasons for using online applications or software as a service (SaaS) as it's sometimes called.
- Save Money - First, you'll have lower IT costs
since you no longer need to employ people to worry about servers and
software. Second, there are economies of scale at work. The vendor can
allow several clients to share servers and resources resulting in a
lower cost to the end users. Finally, most services are pay-as-you-go.
There's no big investment in new hardware and software as with the
typical on-premise systems. Just pay your monthly application fee and
you're off to the races.
- Save Time - Let's face it, any new software system
is going to take some time to get setup and in place, but with most web
applications, you can start using it the first day.
- The Latest and Greatest Innovations - Most online
services are being upgraded every few months if not every few weeks.
With online software, you get all the new features as soon as they are
ready. This is one of the things I really enjoy at WhenToManage,
we get some great opportunities to delight our clients. Someone may
make a suggestion to us on Friday and by Monday they could see it in
production.
- Global Availability - You can access your data
from anywhere at anytime. And furthermore, your data is typically much
safer in your vendor's world-class data center, than it is in your
overcrowded office/closet in the back of the store. Most vendors
provide highly available systems with several backups of your data.
- Community - The companies providing these services
are typically very close with their customers. With a product that gets
updates so frequently, there is usually an online dialogue or
conversation between the company and its clients that results in a type
of collaboration. This public back and forth really opens things up and
allows the client be involved in the direction of the company.
I'm sure there are a few more reasons that I have left off my list, but
in the end, it's simply a choice between embracing the future and
hanging on to the past. Those who board the train early will have the
competitive advantage. Don't wait too long.
Posted by Jeff Schacher on Fri, Jan 09, 2009 @ 05:37 PM
These
days there are several vendors offering web-based solutions for
restaurants. The more units a restaurant has, the more benefit to
using an online solution. In my next post, I will dive into the details
regarding all the benefits to using software as a service (SaaS), but
first let's take a look at what is out there.
- Labor Scheduling - this is the first place for any
restaurant to start. Let's face it, you're online and your employees
are online. With online scheduling, everyone can get their schedules
via the web, email, or cell phone. They can make requests, trade
shifts, and just basically communicate with the staff. At WhenToManage, this was our first product that we launched. HotSchedules is another company that offers a solution.
- Inventory Management - one great thing about
web-based inventory is that more and more suppliers are offering online
ordering, so it only makes sense to allow these systems to talk to each
other. For a restaurant company with more than one unit, an online
solution allows them to manage their recipes from a central location as
well as manage the entire supply chain from any laptop in the world. WhenToManage offers online inventory, if anyone knows of another web-based solution out there, please let me know.
- Reporting - getting the numbers from a single
location is one thing, but when you start multiplying it by 5, 10, or
50, you really need a system to pull everything together from your POS
systems, inventory systems, payroll systems, etc. Just imagine
automatically getting an email on your Blackberry every morning at 7am
with all your sales data from all your stores for the previous day. WhenToManage offers this as does a company called Guest Metrics.
- Marketing - this should actually be #1, but I
thought it was too obvious. Unfortunately, it's probably not obvious
enough for a lot of companies out there. There is not an easier or
cheaper way to reach your customers than email. At the very least, you
should have a customer database and send them an occasional email about
your latest and greatest promotion. From there, you can upgrade to a
loyalty program and stored value cards. There are lots of great companies that offer these services. Fishbowl and Stored Value Solutions are two that come to mind, but there are many others.
- POS (Point-of Sale) - POS
systems are the core of any restaurant operation, and a web-based POS
solution may strike fear into your heart, but rest assured, there are
some amazing products out there and they all have systems to secure
your data and keep everything working when the Internet goes down. How
great would it be to update a price a) from home b) for 20 stores at
the touch of a button? How great would it be to open the store in the
morning with the latest POS upgrade that installed itself before you
got in (and did I mention that your other 20 stores were also
automatically upgraded at the same time)? NetPOS offers a fantastic solution that I know quite well, and Halo also offers a web-based POS.
Hopefully, this will get you thinking about making the next step in the evolution of your restaurant.