Costs in a digital restaurant can quickly escalate across every aspect of each store.

It’s vital to identify weaknesses or areas which are impacting on profitability and the customer experience and increase efficiency across every part of the front and back of house operations.

So, how can efficiency be improved?

Here are 11 ways to focus your efforts on:

1. Understand where your losses lie

 

Running a digital restaurant is a huge juggling act, especially if you’ve adopted a number of digital partners which aren’t integrated and don’t ‘speak to ‘one another. It’s important to take a step back and see where the bottle necks are, whether stock variances are costing the business and across which sites.

By looking at every aspect of the business, you can understand where efficiency savings can be made, and which parts can be streamlined.

2. Equip staff with the technology they need

 

If employee’s time is taken up with managing different delivery partner tablets, or the communication channels from the front of house to the back of house are ineffective, then opportunities to improve things such as table management, employee motivation enhancing the overall customer experience can’t be identified.

 

3. Reduce human error

 

Integrating your sales channels into one consolidated platform that directly links to a kitchen management system, reduces errors at the point of ordering and during the food production.

Adjust menus and recipes from one centralised platform, further eliminating errors and increasing automation of processes. Any reduction in errors not only improves business performance, but it also helps to avoid negative customer interactions which could go on to impact the business’ reputation.

 

4. Upskill your team

Equipping your team with the latest technology solution is investing in the future of your digital restaurant.

However, the team need to be trained in how to fully utilise this and get every single benefit from it.

A great example of this is a new POS system.

These can be hugely underutilised, especially around accessing specific reports, so choose a supplier that delivers training as part of the package.

 

5. Make it easy to track the cash

 

By integrating revenue management into your core hospitality tech solution, you can track the cash from every single revenue stream. With better insight you can drive down costs and improve demand forecasting by understanding where all the revenue has come from, whether that’s via third party sales channels or loyalty and gift cards.

 

6. Promote loyalty

 

Increase customer loyalty and turn customers into regulars by building partnerships with loyalty and reward partners to offer tailored incentives, gift cards and experiences.

These can be integrated into your centralised hospitality tech platform to create a seamless approach to loyalty and reward programmes.

 

7. Make your data work harder

 

How well do you really know your restaurants?

You might have an idea of sales numbers, but the key to running an efficient digital restaurant is to understand why the numbers are what they are and what’s contributed to them. Being able to drill down to consolidated and specific data that matters creates a clear picture of what’s happening in all areas.

8. Make stock management simple

 

Purchasing and managing your stock is one of the most important, and time consuming parts of running a digital restaurant.

Automating the adjustment of stock controls and accurate reporting are all vital ways in which you can control, monitor and track stock levels.

It keeps costs down, because by having electronic ordering, stock counts and stock movements with recipes by sales channel controls inventory and ensures customer demand can be met with the flexibility to scale up or scale down according to business performance.

 

9. Streamline food preparation

 

Predicting demand can be time consuming and costly. It increases the chance of wastage and popular products becoming unavailable to the customer at peak times.

Planning production as accurately as possible gives Digital Restaurants complete scalability over their production and allows stock to be adjusted where demand peaks and dips.

This minimises food wastage and improves the profitability of every restaurant.

10. Invest in a modern POS System

 

One of the most important aspects of a digital restaurant is to have a POS system that allows your team to know what’s going on in the restaurant at all times, including menu availability and order status.

A good POS system will have efficiency features like table management, faster payments, custom floor maps, inventory, and usage rates. It’ll give you actionable insights, so you can make decisions faster and multiple stores can be managed with ease.

11. Communicate with the kitchen

 

Link all sales channels to a kitchen management system and have effective communication from the front of house to the back of house operations.

No one likes to be kept waiting for their meal, so it’s important your restaurant has an effective system and process in place to ensure the staff can communicate with the kitchen, so delivery drivers, customers waiting for click and collect and at tables receive their orders on time.

We deliver solutions for the digital restaurant of the future.

Centegra Plus is the platform that gives every digital restaurant the ability to digitally transform and manage that transformation seamlessly. It integrates sales channels, stock management, revenue management has a fully customisable production planner, helping every store manage and plan around expected demand.

Want a demo?

Contact us today