Technology

Enhance restaurant efficiency with system integration

Photograph: Shutterstock

Restaurant operators are always striving to increase profitability while continuing to deliver an exceptional customer experience. There are many ways to enhance efficiency, including optimizing employee schedules, analyzing performance metrics and streamlining purchasing.

Learning how to facilitate various tasks in business leads to some cost savings, but how can operators continue to leverage the benefits of digital transformation? Let’s discuss a few important ways to do so that you may not seem obvious: the management and deployment of internal systems.

Connect back-office systems the right way

A restaurant’s efficiency is enhanced by having a richly merged platform for end-to-end control of back-office operations. That platform should include everything from workforce management and purchase-to-pay to inventory management and recipe and menu engineering.

A fully efficient platform should deliver these features and benefits:

  • One username and password for all the apps. This means less to worry about, less administration and less wasted employee time. Today, operators can no longer expect staff to be beholden to centralized, head office systems that they have to log in to from a desktop PC, while remembering which of their dozen different passwords they need to use. Simple, role-based and secure ID management means employees only need to remember one username and password to access all applications relevant to them. Single sign-on helps managers, too, as being able to easily manage ID and access helps minimize cyber risk. Instead of struggling with the system management of employees using personal email addresses, single sign-on makes it much easier to revoke access once employees are no longer on the payroll. It’s a win-win for employees and for owners.
  • Fully integrated systems. These translate to a totally unified technology framework that underpins operations and ensures data flows through the system correctly, thereby reducing administrative time and eliminating errors. System integration makes seamless connection to third-party applications possible. It also enables the enterprise architecture to bring together data sources such as POS, payroll, purchasing, mystery diner, menu management, bookings, reviews and training into one central reporting hub.

What to look for in an all-encompassing platform

Select a system that has single sign-on to manage everything and that can easily integrate other functionalities. One platform, such as the one in the Fourth solution, delivers optimized labor and inventorywith one username and one mobile app to manage all back-office tasks.

Leveraging the efficiency benefits of one platform solution for back-office systems is a smart decision, and it helps employees do their job even better.

Learn more about the Fourth Platform. If you’d like to talk more about how Fourth can help achieve your goals, give us a call.

This post is sponsored by Fourth

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