How do food court management systems, such as the QPOS ERP platform, help with vendor coordination, offering a centralised payment system for food courts and an improved customer experience? Discover now!

Are you planning to rent, lease, or buy a prime food court space and strike deals with multiple vendors? Without the right food court management system, you are signing up for an uphill task!

In this blog, we have listed the challenges of running a food court, while highlighting how to skip those hurdles with a powerful combination of operations management software, robust kiosks, and POS hardware. Read to know how to manage multiple vendors in a food court, the importance of a centralised payment system for food courts, and to discover many more insights into the business model.

Let’s begin with the very fundamental question!

What is a Food Court Management System?

A food court is more than just a common umbrella for different businesses. For example, in terms of inventory management, menus across outlets can vary drastically for a common inventory control effort. 

Visibility into each process is key for delivering a unified customer experience, which in turn influences the individual success of the vendors and the owners, as well as their collective success.

However, the challenge food court managements face is delivering a unified experience, requiring the decision-makers to:

Track inventory levels and sales of each vendor
Distribute revenue among all the vendors
Collect rent, profit share or both from the businesses

To successfully track these various aspects of the multi-vendor business, the food court management must have access to each vendor’s accurate and updated business data at the same touchpoint. 

This is where a robust enterprise-grade ERP solution, such as QPOS, —which, in this context, is a food court management system, —becomes vital!

On that note, let’s examine the impact of an ERP like QPOS—which, in this case, performs as a food court management system—on business productivity and customer satisfaction. Let’s start with the challenges of handling a host of different vendors and how food court management systems prove to be transformative!

Curious about How to Manage Multiple Vendors in a Food Court? Begin with Discovering Key Challenges

The pointers below illustrate the common operations management problems prevalent in food court operations:

Customer Experience: Guests usually expect the same quality and service speed across outlets, although each outlet is managed by separate business owners.
 Shared Infrastructure: Seating and maintenance are common resources among outlets. While maintenance or the ambience quality can be centrally controlled, managing tables such that every visitor, across outlets, has access to seats is practically impossible during rush hours.
Revenue Management: Error-free and transparent accounting is key to upholding vendors’ trust. Hence, if the ERP software platform doesn’t allow frequent updates, then GST calculations are likely to be erroneous, leading to disputes.

How Do Food Court Management Systems Like the Easy-to-Customise QPOS Solve Problems in Handling Multiple Vendors?

Importance of Using Food Court Management Systems for Food Court Owners

Here are the benefits of a food court management system from the perspective of the food court owners:

More Control and Visibility into the Billing: The centralised payment system/ billing interface, which includes the billing module and the accounting software integration of the QPOS ERP, allows the management to control software updates for consistent and accurate billing standards and sales tracking. Hence, evading sales data, if the vendor’s contract involves revenue sharing, is no longer feasible with the software platform. Also, QPOS has role-based access to modules and fields, thereby eliminating any unauthorised tampering of data.
Better Infrastructure for Payment Diversity: In terms of managing customer experience, the food court management is likely to have the infrastructure to support payment method diversity, which many small vendors may not otherwise be able to support independently. Therefore, the centralised payment system for food courts saves the owners the opportunity cost of losing customers who may otherwise be unable to pay these small vendors because these guests prefer to pay via credit, debit cards, or any digital payment methods.
Swifter Service Time: The centralised payment system for food court guests to cross-order across outlets at the same time, leading to less order-taking and ultimately shorter service wait time, thus improving the customer experience.
Enhanced Promotions and Loyalty Management: Centralised payment systems for food courts are vital for the management to track customer behaviour accurately, leading to improved loyalty management and better use of offers and promotions thanks to the Analytics and Reporting modules of the platform. This module can crunch complex data sets into easy-to-understand, interactive dashboards and charts. It is worth adding that with a food court management system, a single loyalty program can encourage larger ticket sizes while also leading to more repeat visits—a net win-win for vendors as well as the food court owners.
Superior Customer Experience: Is the food court business model one of lease or rent, instead of revenue-sharing or revenue-sharing-cum-rent? Even then, performance tracking via QPOS ERP is essential for long-term success.

To understand the need for tracking the performance of vendors who are only obligated to pay rent, let’s consider this scenario:

A certain business has been consistently failing to serve quality food. Due to this quality control issue, other vendors may also suffer, as many customers may see the overall food court experience in a poor light, leading to a dip in footfall.

Similarly, poor inventory management can be a source of disappointment for customers. Here, too, the food court management system can save the day. ERPs such as QPOS allow centralised inventory synchronisation, leading to tracking the inventory levels, spoilage, spoilage-centric quality control, monitoring of inventory audits, etc., for all the businesses. 

Further, the food court’s common infrastructure can help smaller vendors make the best of the common technology suite, which includes expensive ERP-integrated hardware, such as Kitchen Display Systems (KDS) and self-service kiosks, which enable queue-busting and faster order preparation.

Greater Scope for Personalised Service: If the common ERP system is an AI-powered restaurant management platform like that of QPOS, customers can also enjoy a personalised experience, with AI recommendations or exclusive offers based on the guest’s historical data, trending dishes, and other considerations.

Instances of Win-Win for Vendors and the Food Court Management: Exploring the Benefits of Food Court Management Systems Like QPOS for Vendors

Here are a few advantages of a robust food court management software for vendors:

Better Inventory Management: Opting for a centralised procurement agreement, vendors can reduce their cost of goods used and reduce wastage through insights from the inventory tracking and recipe management module of QPOS. The two modules help reduce shrinkage by controlling spoilage and smart limited-period offers for inventory clearance, respectively.
Improved Traction: With minimal or shared marketing fees and infrastructure costs, vendors, especially small businesses, can optimise the spotlight on their outlet.

Frequently Asked Questions About Food Court Management Systems

Is managing a food court the same as managing a franchise?

No! While a franchise has the same menu, policies, and access to the management’s resources, food courts have varying SLAs with vendors, diverse cuisines, and complex multi-vendor inventory management, among other challenges.

How does a Food Court Management System differ from an enterprise business ERP?

Unlike franchises, food court management involves:

Revenue disbursement from the food court owner to the vendor at a fixed interval
Inventory diversity
Managing shared infrastructure, including seating, washroom, centralised air conditioner, certain POS hardware, the common operations management software, etc.
Multi-vendor inventory tracking and audits
Customer Experience Management across vendors

Is QPOS a Cloud ERP?

Yes.

Does QPOS adapt itself to GST updates?

On QPOS, users can easily edit the billing module’s GST field based on the changes. Once updated, billing compliance is met. However, as far as accounting is concerned, QPOS allows API-based, quick integration into platforms such as Tally, should the customer opt for the integration.

The Way Forward with QPOS

As food courts continue to grow in malls, airports, IT parks, and commercial hubs, QPOS remains committed to ensuring accurate and transparent billing and reliable cloud hosting, leading to enhanced vendor coordination, centralised payments, and customer satisfaction, creating an ecosystem of mutual benefits between food court owners and vendors.

Curious to know more about the comprehensive food court management system platform that QPOS offers? Contact us, and one of our executives will reach out to you shortly to answer your queries and to share an attractive quote!

Hit the ground running, supported by a smooth operations management platform!