Fast growing technology is penetrating each industry, bringing numerous advantages and helping businesses optimize productivity. If you are looking for ways to make your restaurant more innovative while improving your team processes, you should know that you are not alone. According to research conducted by the National Restaurant Association, 32 percent of restaurant owners believe their business is lacking restaurant technologies.
There are several ways you can use technology for improving your everyday business operations and processes. Let’s dive into some of them:
Automate and Digitize Your Back of House
Even in this tech-savvy world we now live in, many restaurants are still using antiquated methods in the back of the house. This includes food prep labels written by hand and use-by dates that are manually calculated; employee training disseminated via printed manuals; recipe cards shared among locations via binders that become obsolete almost immediately. Sound familiar? Having a solution that automates and digitizes these procedures is crucial to improving your team’s process.
Mobile Ordering & Scheduling
Large organizations and small restaurant business all over the world are using mobile technology to improve operations and the customer experience.
The opportunities you will get if you incorporate mobile into your restaurant business are endless. Whether it’s developing a simple ordering app that customers can use to pre-order, or using a table reservation-system like OpenTable, restaurants are urged to include mobile technology into their business for a good reason. It can really streamline the guest experience and make ordering and scheduling much more efficient.
Mobile-Centric Tools for Managers and Staff
Restaurant managers spend a great deal of their time making sure workflows run at optimal efficiency while interacting with customers. However, managers also have business tasks that often interfere with their primary objectives. Emails, mandatory reports, accounting, and similar tasks often cause managers to be spread very thin. Use of mobile apps will ease your manager’s work by far. Mobile-centric devices can give a restaurant manager the power of managing business-level tasks without having to leave the floor. They instantly get a bird’s eye view of all restaurant activities and operations.
Smart Kitchen Technology
We all know the kitchen is the heart of every restaurant. The Internet of Things makes it possible to create smart kitchen technology that connects multiple devices and can prevent potential issues before they arise. It is a fantastic way to make your kitchen work smarter, not harder.
Managers receive real-time monitoring reports on the equipment, and whenever maintenance is required, they will receive alerts. This not only prevents disasters, it also saves time and money.
If a grill gets too hot, or the stove signals a problem, the manager will get immediate notification and in many cases, corrective actions to take. They can remotely control on and off functions which allow them to save energy, and they save time by keeping up-to-date with kitchen equipment performance.
Bringing innovation into your restaurant business improves your team’s operations and leads to enhanced productivity. Make sure you leverage the latest technologies because chances are your competition is already working it.