Many entrepreneurs who open restaurants have an unrealistic idea of how successful restaurants are operated today. There is this general feeling that the top restaurants have a magic formula for operating that is impossible to duplicate and depends heavily on finding the handful of supremely skilled operators. Although like any business, restaurants demand that a skilled operators is in charge, this person is one of only several key ingredients necessary to have a profitable restaurant that patrons love to frequent.
Perhaps one of least considered areas of a top restaurant is the technology used in keeping the efficiency of the restaurant at its height. Today companies have developed restaurant tech that is tested and designed to understand restaurant processes and provide tools that integrate improve them. The result is new levels of efficiency, higher quality customer service and better quality food.
Many restaurant owners will hear about the important role that restaurant technology can play in the success of a restaurant and get concerned that they do not know where to start. Here are some tips for a few of the important restaurant technologies you should purchase for your restaurant.
Recipe Viewer
One of the reasons that people continue to come to a restaurant whose food they enjoy is the food is prepared consistently well every time. This means that the same exact ingredients are used in the same amounts and the preparation of the dishes are consistent and precise. With so many people working in the kitchen, new kitchen staff coming in, and with different combinations of cooking staff, having food consistency can be extremely difficult. This is where a recipe viewer is so valuable.
A recipe viewer is a portable computer tablet delivered online portal that allows you to list and display recipes to your cooking staff on demand. It will display the same recipes to everyone so that food can be prepared consistently and precisely each time. It also functions as a as a trainer that works 24/7 to make sure food is prepared accurately and that new employees have all of the information they need to create the best guest experience.
Recipes can be located on the fly and modified if needed. And you can provide recipes across restaurant sites to ensure consistency at several locations simultaneously.
Kitchen Display System
Today you can find great technology to improve the back of your house activities of your restaurant, but the best technologies improve the front and back of the house areas. One great option for this is if you purchase a top of the line kitchen display system. Here are some of the benefits it can offer your restaurant:
- Reduced ticket times
- It will integrates easily and fully with your POS, guest management solution, premise pager systems, printer solutions, third party hardware solutions and, delivery and online ordering solutions creating an entire solution for management of the critical systems in your restaurant.
- Gather critical data on issues including ticket times, kitchen bottlenecks, labor efficiencies and inefficiencies, menu reporting up to the minute and made available to management constantly.
- Management of off-premise dining strategies. Merge in-house with off-premise traffic, monitor and reduce kitchen stress and provide guests with real-time order tracking.
The benefits of as robust are obvious and the most attractive part of the system is that the better your staff gets at using it the more efficiencies it will create.
If you implement these technologies they will require some staff retraining and a period of time to get things humming, but soon you will see that many of the challenges you faced before using them no longer apply and you are able to focus your time on other key areas of your restaurant that really need your attention.