How to Fill Gaps in Restaurant Operations with Technology
Yes, restaurant management software, or restaurant ERPs, such as QPOS, can indeed streamline restaurant workflows. However, as far as restaurant workflow optimisation is concerned, merely installing an ERP into the POS terminal barely scratches the surface!
So, What is Restaurant Automation?
An end-to-end plan for automated restaurant operations comprises a comprehensive approach to integrating restaurant automation solutions—hardware and software—in an interconnected web, connecting each workflow. In other words, workflow and restaurant automation solutions go hand in hand, ensuring optimal productivity!
What is the Connection Between Restaurant Management Software & Hardware and Restaurant Workflow Optimisation?
While the ERP software connects each hardware solution, planned workflows ensure that the key operations management solutions are in place from the get-go!
Therefore, to help budding restaurateurs and those planning legacy modernisation in their operations, we demonstrate the merits of fully automated restaurant operations in this blog. Read the following scenario to learn how to patch gaps in the restaurant automation suite for a continuous flow of restaurant data. Let’s dive in!
How to Design a Seamlessly Automated Restaurant Operation? Here is a Step-by-Step Guide by Quinta!
How to Manage Billing and Accounting at the Same Touchpoint?
The pointers below illustrate the process:
- Install Quinta’s Restaurant Management Software at different touchpoints, including order-taking tablets, kiosks, and POS terminals, to ensure a seamless billing process.
- Across all the restaurant automation solutions mentioned, the customer ID, often linked to the mobile number and loyalty card details, helps consolidate items ordered at different stages of the restaurant visit—at the kiosk, the table, and the cash counter.
- The digitised process eliminates billing errors.
- QPOS allows the swift update of GST details when new reforms come.
- The restaurant management software offers a unified interface for individual invoices as well as total sales in a given time, GST obligations, profits, etc., thanks to effortless accounting software integrations into QPOS and the restaurant ERP’s Analytics module.
A key advantage of this connected billing experience across devices during dine-in experiences is that the ERP integration creates a smooth customer journey and helps avoid billing disputes, thus boosting customer satisfaction and upholding trust.
What Role Does Integrating Restaurant Automation Solution Hardware with Restaurant Management Software Play in Inventory Management?
In one of our previous blog about Bakery Inventory Management, we discovered how an integrated POS ecosystem, including QPOS ERP, POS terminals and peripherals, and POS scales, streamlines inventory management and lends visibility into the inventory movement across workflows.
The blog mentioned above explains how POS scales, being integrated with ERPs, automatically help the restaurant register the amount of inventory received, used, and measured at every stage: upon procurement and during inventory planning, audits, and inventory use, which is done in two stages:
- While moving the inventory from the pantry to the kitchen
- When the kitchen stock is used for preparing individual dishes
What makes this inventory management workflow, which includes tracking inventory levels, stand out is the following set of pointers:
- Improved supervision of the stocks, preventing revenue leakage caused by spoilage and theft-driven shrinkage
- Successful audits, due to a digitised inventory tracking workflow that created a trail of every inventory item’s movement
- QPOS, with its Analytics module, also helps automatically identify the necessary quantity of ingredients to be procured during the next stocking cycle based on upcoming and ongoing trends, current inventory levels, historical data, and insights into spoilage and overall shrinkage
- QPOS ERP also has OCR capabilities, which help in auto-extracting text from Purchase Orders (POs) to instantly verify the procurement against the readings after measuring the fresh inventory received at the restaurant
How Does Restaurant Workflow Optimisation, Realised with the Help of Restaurant Management Software, Improve Service?
Here are the reasons why restaurant automation solutions integrated with restaurant ERPs, such as QPOS, prove to be vital for quality customer service:
- The improved inventory tracking and planning process, mentioned in the previous section, ensures that customer demands are promptly met based on their usual orders as well as ongoing trends, and offers (specific to the business). Moreover, the restaurant management software enables businesses to have better control over curb-side pickups, online orders, and other prepaid services, where the digital ordering menu is often used. When a key ingredient is exhausted for a dish, which can be ordered via any of the prepaid services, the ERP helps deactivate the field for ordering the dish on websites, kiosks, and food aggregator apps. Hence, ERPs can reduce the number of instances when a restaurant is embarrassed for being unable to serve customers their preferred dishes.
- ERPs such as QPOS instantly generate KOTs (Kitchen Order Tickets), thus informing the kitchen when an order is placed or modified. By making the transfer of KOT from the waiter to the chef redundant, this synchronisation between the back-of-house and front-of-house helps reduce service time, a key driver of customer satisfaction.
- ERPs integrated with the Kitchen Display System monitor allow customers to keep an eye on their service wait time, thus managing their expectations.
- The inventory management and recipe management modules are responsible for upholding the quality of ingredients and standardising dish preparation, respectively. The impact of both modules is integral to managing the taste profile of the dishes served.
- Upon food preparation, the designated service staff on the designated front-of-house is alerted both via the KDS as well as the QPOS Waiter App. Further, by digitising the service process through the app, QPOS is also helpful in enabling servers to steer clear of any order mix-ups during order-taking or serving.
How Does Restaurant Management Software Help Bridge Potential Gaps in Employee Management?
ERPs like QPOS also have staff management modules, which help schedule shifts and track punch-ins, punch-outs, and leaves, among other factors that go into calculating paychecks. Also, when combined with CCTV footage and the Analytics module of restaurant management software, ERPs can help detect payroll fraud during audits. However, there are more restaurant frauds that the joint forces of restaurant automation solution hardware and software can help prevent. We have covered more on restaurant fraud prevention in one of our blog about Cloud-Based Restaurant ERP. This blog further illustrates the different processes that ERPs and restaurant management hardware seamlessly connect, thereby not only preventing fraud with increased workflow visibility but also streamlining processes for greater efficiency.
Final Thoughts
The goal of this blog was to illustrate how apparently distinct restaurant workflows can be linked and managed via a single interface with the help of robust restaurant automation solution hardware, where advanced restaurant management software, such as QPOS, is installed. We have attempted to cover some of the most tangible, laborious, and time-consuming workflows in this blog. However, the list is not exhaustive, and there are also several intangible advantages of software platforms like QPOS.
Curious to know more?
Contact us today, and an executive will support you in bridging the gaps in your restaurant operations, having shown, through detailed demos, how QPOS can solve the challenges posed by unintegrated workflows.
What are you waiting for? Let’s connect to get you hitting the ground running!
