How Restaurant Automation System Increases Operational Efficiency

With the advent of new age technologies, the entire restaurant operations are getting immensely automated. With the inaugural of GulfHost 2017 trade show, the restaurant industry experts in UAE are discovering the best technology solutions to stay ahead of competitors. The restaurant automation system is honing the restaurant operations massively and reducing the dependency of the restaurants on the manual labor excessively. The system helps the restaurants to automate everything, right from billing, inventory and stock, CRM and marketing, analyzing the business through detailed reports, vendor management, and employee management. Once all these operations get automated, you will be able to run restaurant seamlessly and will ensure that you deliver a stellar customer service, which will help you in customer retention.

The UAE restaurant space is expanding and sprawling on a massive scale. Considering the predicament of the situation, when all the restaurants are striving hard to be the best in the business, what is stopping you from leveraging technology that will augment your business like never before?

7 Reasons Why Restaurants In UAE Should Employ Restaurant Automation System 

Automating the restaurant operations will help you deliver the best services, which is immensely important to build a band of loyal customers. Install a robust restaurant POS that will help you boost your restaurant’s efficiency by leaps and bounds in the UAE market. Read below and know how a restaurant automation system will help your business grow.

1. Easy Billing Process

Billing is one of the most important functions that a restaurant has to perform on a daily basis. Initially, this was taken care of by the cashier and the restaurant staff. However, with the passage of time, it was realized that depending on the manual labor is not only time-consuming it also leaves a lot of scope of manual mistakes.

On the other hand, customers started demanding for better services like split billing, easy billing process which when done manually does not bring out the best results. In addition to this, the restaurant industry is notorious for internal theft and pilferages makes it all the more important to automate the entire billing operations, which will ensure that such activities are kept at the bay.

A restaurant automation system will help you fix all the loopholes in the billing process.

• Instances of bill duplicates and fallacies, and behind the counter thefts can be easily avoided. This is primarily because the restaurant automation system will send the owner detailed reports of all the bills generated in a particular day. In addition, whenever a bill is void, it will send real-time alerts to the restaurant owner. Such functions will deter the restaurant staff to take a plunge and try and fill their own pockets.
• A restaurant automation system will come with features like split billing which will enhance the customer service of your restaurant. Split billing is primarily splitting the bill as per what the individual customers had in a large group so that one pays for what one eats.
• You will get detailed updates of all the discounts and offers conferred. This will help you to keep under check a large number of discounts given by the restaurant staff unnecessarily.

2. Streamlined Stock And Inventory Operations

It is extremely important to keep a check on the inventory section on a daily basis. Since running out of an important item on a busy hour of the day will be extremely detrimental for the health of your restaurant business. In addition, apart from behind the counter thefts, the inventory section is also very known for such dubious activities that have the potential of bleeding your restaurant dry. Know how a restaurant automation system will help you with managing your stock  and inventory operations with ease:

• Automating the inventory section will ensure that your kitchen never runs of stock. It will send you real-time alerts whenever an item reaches its re-order level. This will also save your restaurant from ordering more than what is required.
• Whenever an item reaches its expiry date, it will send you alerts, and this will save you from using an item that is expired, which if used will prove to be extremely detrimental to the health of your restaurant.
• Whenever an item is taken from the inventory it will be noted on the POS this will ensure that internal theft is kept under check.
• Whenever the goods are received from the inventory, the item name along with the quantity of the item is updated on the POS to ensure the transactional transparency.

3. Seamless Order Taking

Order taking is a process that every restaurant must try and streamline immensely. Any mistakes or loopholes in this process can make your business lose more than what you can expect. With a restaurant automation system, you can optimize the efficiency of your order taking operations like never before:

• Table or tablet order is immensely useful since, your servers will have the full menu in front of them, this helps him to upsell and apply suggestive selling techniques as per the customer’s ordering history.
• Automate your KOT generation process. Once the customer places the order the KOT will be generated on the floor and will be automatically sent to the kitchen, where the entire order will be displayed on the KDS. This will negate the requirement for the server to run from the tables to the kitchen to hand over the KOT. This will accelerate the food preparation process and will reduce the table turnover time remarkably.
• Whenever a customer changes his order after placing, it will automatically get updated on the KDS and the chefs at work can start preparing the food without delay.
• Your restaurant must be receiving orders from multiple channels, like the delivery ordering platforms and the orders on call. Maintaining all the orders from the various sources manually is a handsome amount of a task. Hence, if you have a restaurant automating system, it will help you receive all such orders at one central place, This will ensure that you don’t miss out on any orders.

4. Enhanced CRM And Marketing

Nurturing a robust CRM and running marketing campaigns on the information garnered is one of the basic prerequisites that will help you in creating a band of loyal customers. If you make the process manual dependent, not only will it be time-consuming and hence often neglected, it will also involve a lot of scope of manual labor, especially while updated the customer information. In order to avoid any such situation, it is extremely important for you to automate the entire CRM and marketing process.

• Whenever a customer walks into your restaurant, make it a habit and take the customer feedback on the floor of the restaurant. Once you have a feedback app that is integrated with the CRM and synced with the central POS, all the customer information will automatically get updated on the CRM database. This will negate the need for you to manually update all the customer information.
• Once you have a restaurant automation system on board, it will help the restaurant to update the customer details of those who place the online orders as well. This will accelerate your CRM update process immensely.
• Once you have a robust CRM, you can run targeted marketing campaigns. Also, a restaurant automation system will help you run outlet and customer specific marketing campaigns. Such personalized marketing efforts will be high on ROI.

5. Detailed Reports To Help Your Business Grow

A restaurant automation system will be able to send you detailed billing, inventory, CRM, marketing reports. This will help you understand the areas where your restaurant is not working as per expectation. This will especially come in handy if you are running multiple outlets. Since the system will be empowered to send you compared reports of all the outlets. On the basis of the information garnered you can change the strategies for the outlets which aren’t performing that well.

6. Simplified Vendor Management

Managing vendors can get tedious at time. This is especially if you are running a restaurant chain. A restaurant automation system will ensure that you have a vendor module, where all the vendor will have their profiles, and other details and contact information. The vendor will also have access to this profile and they can accent the indents raised by the outlets directly. As a restaurant owner, you will be able to see all the indents raised by all the outlets and the transactions that happen between the restaurant staff and the vendors. Such a high level of automation will ensure that you are thoroughly in tune with all the happening at your restaurant.

7. Better Restaurant Staff Management

Since it is your employees who will be on the floor, interact with the customers directly every day, it is extremely important that you manage them well. You as a restaurant owner might not be able to visit the restaurant on a regular basis, this, however, does not mean that you will have not to control over your employees. A restaurant automation system that comes with an employee management module will ensure that you are in contact with all your employee remotely.

This module will have detailed records of all your employee work, their attendance, and their performance, On the basis of this you can roll out incentives and appraisals to some, words of encouragement to the others.

We hope that you have gained a comprehensive understanding of how a restaurant automation system will increase the operational efficiency of the restaurant. This will help in reducing the table turnaround time, and hence increasing the sales exponentially. Such a robust system will also ensure that you have tight control of your restaurant business remotely, and this will ensure that your restaurant business in UAE is not going haywire.