Customers today, especially at their local QSR, not only expect a rapid and accurate ordering experience but also want their meals fulfilled and handed to them in the same manner. As important as it is to offer the meals customers crave, it is equally as important to ensure the food customers order comes back to them hot, fresh, and accurate. This makes it a necessity for restaurant brands to implement the solutions needed to facilitate a streamlined and frictionless order fulfillment and management strategy.

But how exactly can QSR brands create these strategies?

From our latest webinar, “How Zaxby’s Unified Tech Approach is Creating a Rewarding Guest Experience & Company Growth”, Mike Nettles, Zaxby’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, recounts how Zaxby’s was able to create a friction-free ordering and order management strategy. Let’s dive into some of the fantastic insights Nettles provides on successful strategies to overcome these challenges.

Frictionless Order Fulfillment and Order Management Starts with POS Systems

When establishing a frictionless order fulfillment and management strategy, it was a necessity for Zaxby’s to leverage modern, cloud-based POS software to facilitate faster and more consistent speeds of service as well as improved order accuracy. According to Mike Nettles, they desperately needed their new POS system to ensure “the right orders are going to the right makeline at the right time.” To Zaxby’s and many other QSRs alike, it is crucial to operations that they can do just-in-time drops, just-in-time bin management, and can successfully hand over customer orders hot and fresh “so it has not been sitting underneath a heating lamp or anything like that.”

Zaxby’s decided to implement PAR Brink POS for its cloud-based POS software design, incredible APIs, and ability to ‘play nicely’ with third-party integrations, all of which help the brand chew through customer orders accurately. Additionally, they wanted to take advantage of “a richer, more uncoupled GUI environment so that [they] can improve [their] speed of service, ease of order entry, and multilingual capabilities”, said Nettles.

With the PAR partnership, Zaxby’s is provided bench strength as an enterprise-class player with published APIs and a third-party-approved integrator package. According to Nettles, these capabilities ensure that he does not “have to invent everything on [his] own”.

Brink POS has been the right remedy for Zaxby’s order fulfillment and management struggles and has proven to show “a lot of value out of the box for a brand that just has not embraced modernization until very recently.”

Partner with Expert and Experienced Technology Vendors

Another crucial aspect for Zaxby’s when creating a frictionless ordering and order management strategy was partnering with the right technology vendor. What they sought was a partner who had the expertise and experience to ensure a smooth transition to new systems as well as the ability to scale with the brand. And PAR has done just that for Zaxby’s by facilitating an incredibly simple transition to new POS systems. “The user interface and the user experience are very QSR-friendly,” said Nettles. “Hands down, one of the things that we really liked about PAR was you spoke QSR. PAR is no stranger to working at an enterprise level,” explained Nettles.

Throughout the years of trial and error, one of the biggest challenges Mike Nettles has experienced is finding a tech provider that will not outgrow the brand. “The biggest problem that I’ve run into as a technologist in this industry is outgrowing my tech provider,” said Nettles. “They can’t really scale for professional services, they can’t scale for training, and they certainly can’t scale for support.” However, PAR has exceeded Zaxby’s expectations and has positioned the brand for unlimited scalability well into the future.

With PAR, Zaxby’s is given full transparency and knows exactly who they are dealing with. “I’m dealing with somebody who’s innovative, I know PAR Brink’s heritage and I know where Brink came from,” said Nettles. “[PAR] has really put a nice wrapper of service and support around that to match the enterprise use case. And the fact that the technology just happened to again, kind of fit within that sweet spot of cloud engineering integrated out of the gate just made it all the better.”

Mike Nettles and Zaxby’s have paved an exceptional foundation for creating a bulletproof friction-free order fulfillment and management strategy. Restaurant brands must leverage ideal POS systems from expert and experienced tech vendors to facilitate these frictionless and streamlined strategies. And when brands, like Zaxby’s, find the perfect cloud-based POS software, like Brink POS, from exceptional tech vendors, they can enhance speeds of service, order accuracy, and customer experiences.

Interested in learning more about the solutions needed to create streamlined and frictionless order fulfillment and management? Visit us at partech.com or request a demo today!

When done correctly, restaurant menu engineering can pay dividends by boosting profits by more than 10%. However, in that sentence also lies the rub of all this. When done correctly, restaurants can see the benefits.   

For many restaurant operators, that means figuring out the average cost per ingredient used in every recipe to determine the total cost of creating each dish. Manually attempting to determine the individual costs of every chicken breast, tomato slice, and bay leaf is a harrowing journey that can leave your head spinning.   

Thankfully, what used to be a painstaking manual process owned by one person (because different people value different ingredients differently) can now be handled by your back-office data system.   

By combining the data your point of sale system collects every day with inventory tracking data, you can understand what items on your menu are your top performers and what menu items should be reconsidered.

Menu Engineering 101 

It’s important to know what information you or your back-office system will need to run the equations. In this case, you’re going to need a few helpful pieces of data.   

• Ingredient Costs/Menu-Costing (this total will account for associated delivery fees and other expenses but excludes labor costs)
• Menu Item Sales Prices
• The Number of Menu Items Sold   

Ingredient costs include everything that goes into making each dish, right down to the seasonings. Depending on how many dishes contain the ingredient, you’ll likely have to break this down into specific yields. For example – if a cheeseburger features two slices of tomato and you know one tomato costs $1 and yields eight slices, its ingredient cost would be 25 cents.   

Your menu item sales price is how much you sell that item to your guests. When you divide the menu price by the total cost to make the dish, you can figure out the mark-up for every item (or food cost percentages if you switch the numbers around). 

Finally, you can use the number of menu items sold to determine what products are selling well, what aren’t, and where hidden areas of opportunity are. This data can help influence your overall restaurant menu design, allowing you to get the right items in front of your guests at the right time. 

Keep in mind that while it’s possible to perform a manual inventory on a regular basis, it’s time-consuming and difficult to keep up with. Inventory and ingredient costs are constantly changing depending on seasonality and availability, and can quickly change the margins you receive for a particular dish. 

One of the major benefits a back-office system provides is constantly updated ingredient costs. With that information, operators can keep an eye on prices and adjust them accordingly. Without accurate costing information, operators may not see their best-selling items generating smaller margins. Unfortunately, relying on financial statements doesn’t help. Sometimes those statements can be a month out and by then the damage has already been done.

Stars, Work Horses, Puzzles, and Dogs: Understanding The Menu Engineering Quadrants

Once you understand how much profit you’re making off each dish and which menu items sell well, you can start creating quadrants focused on popularity and profitability. If you’ve never seen a menu engineering chart, the concept is simple.   

On one axis, you have profitability. On the other, you have popularity. The way these charts are set up is menu items with low margins that don’t sell well are in the bottom left corner, while popular items with high margins are in the upper right corner.

When you look at the chart, it’ll look something like the one seen here:

Stars – These are the items on your menu that always do well. They have great profit margins and you sell a ton of them. This quadrant makes you the most money, and every item you offer should strive to be a star. On your digital and paper restaurant menus, these are the items that you want to draw attention to if you want to increase sales.   

Work Horses – These items usually don’t carry a high-profit margin, but they make up for that with sheer volume. If you can find a way to lower the cost to make it or raise the price a little bit, you can turn these trusty troopers into certified stars and increase profit.   

Puzzles – What do you call a mystery wrapped in an enigma? These items tend to have great profit margins, but don’t sell that well. You could be sitting on a goldmine if you figure out a way to promote them. These are items that should be featured prominently alongside your stars on the menu and pushed by your staff as special.   

Dogs – Low-profit margins, low sales. These items contribute very little to your overall sales, take up space on your menu, and siphon ingredients from more popular dishes. If you need to streamline your menu, this is the first place to start cutting from.  

Menu Engineering as an Enhancement

Understanding how the quadrants work and where your menu items fit into the system can help you save money and see a better return on investment for your operation.  

While it’s possible to collect and synthesize your menu data manually, having a back-office data platform is much faster. Using the right inventory software can help you view on-hand products, find variances, determine prices, and see patterns in your food costs.  

Additionally, back-office software can make sense of all your recipes, letting you see what is going on with each dish and track the cost of each item.  

Having a comprehensive and accurate menu engineering program will help you trim down a lengthy menu, design better paper, and online menus, and offer a better understanding of how ingredients are used in your restaurant. With a few quick calculations and a little inventory magic, you can save money, save time, and positively impact the bottom line.

by PAR Technology

Unsurprisingly, restaurant owners and managers favor restaurant POS systems that offer ease of use, affordability, and reliability. Macroeconomic conditions and a variety of other factors have lifted new features to the forefront of considerations for restaurateurs. Specifically, reporting features and third-party integrations are restaurant POS features that have risen in importance according to industry research. A system that takes orders and payments is no longer enough. Restaurateurs want a solution that will help them more efficiently manage more aspects of their operation.

Restaurant operators looking to modernize their restaurant point of sale are looking for features and capabilities that will help them solve staffing shortages, improve efficiency of managers and crew, and address rising costs. These features stand to help any operator, but they compound exponentially the more units under management.

Let’s look at four POS capabilities powering growth for large, multi-unit restaurant chains and growth-aspiring brands.

1. SaaS pricing frees up capital for growth & innovation. Most POS solutions now offer a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) acquisition model that can fit a business owner’s budget today and power growth tomorrow. In a SaaS arrangement, operators avoid much of the up-front capital outlay for purchasing hardware, spreading out affordable payments over time. Of course, this frees up capital – precisely what a restaurateur needs to invest in growth or innovation, whether that means opening a new location, expanding seating onto a patio or adding digital ordering and guest marketing.
2. Enterprise-level reporting improves operational efficiency. POS solutions that offer above-store visibility and reporting help leaders all the way up and down the management chain keep tabs on increasingly critical KPIs such as food and labor costs. Improving shift staffing efficiencies or avoiding theft or waste – even in small increments – will add up over time, and multiply exponentially across large restaurant chains.
3. Rich partner ecosystem built on API integrations improves insights and competitive advantage. Too few technology systems play nicely together and the result is siloed data. And while these solutions may be highly useful and serve their purpose, increasingly, competitive success depends on the ability to act on the information contained in these systems and on both deep and broad visibility into key performance indicators. Systems that share data avoid the need to create labor-intensive workarounds to create insights and understanding. Restaurant chains that get more of their technology from a single provider, or who work with providers that provide native integrations or the ability to create integrations, are better positioned to find efficiencies and gain the advantages that come from data insights.
4. Natively built for and in the cloud. Technologies that are natively built in and for the cloud simplify every aspect of the hospitality tech lifecycle, from deployment to maintenance and management. Requiring less hardware and specialized skills to manage and maintain, they are also more cost-effective. Let’s take a look at a quick comparison of traditional and modern POS as just one example:

These benefits compound the more cloud-based solutions a restaurant system uses. Cloud solutions aren’t limited to POS. More parts of the restaurant technology stack are available in the cloud than ever before. Back office, loyalty/marketing, and many more tech solutions are among the cloud technology systems that can free up capital that restaurateurs can repurpose for innovation and growth.

It doesn’t appear that the economic challenges facing restaurant operators will go away anytime soon. By considering these four restaurant POS capabilities as part of their technology evaluation process, restaurateurs set a high bar for a POS that is more broadly equipped to power innovation, growth, and future-readiness.

Want to learn more about our best-in-class POS system that will future-proof your techstack? Contact us at www.partech.com to schedule your 1:1 demo.

Besides changing and improving how we live and work, one of the coolest things about technology is that it has become easier and more convenient to acquire and use.

Take restaurant technology, for example. Many providers have moved away from requiring restaurant operators to purchase expensive hardware and software outright to a model where the restaurateur subscribes to the software and/or hardware ‘as a service’ — not unlike paying rent or a lease.

What is ‘As-a-Service’?

Think of today’s restaurant technology ‘as-a-service’ subscription model like a business software subscription such as salesforce.com or leasing a car. In the case of software, you pay a monthly fee to access the features from a web browser or lightweight downloadable app. In the case of products like PAR Infinity, the subscription covers your hardware and every aspect and stage of using it: from initial implementation to disposal and replacement.

How is it different from other acquisition models?

In the past, many restaurant tech providers required the restaurant to pay upfront or finance the outright purchase of their POS terminals and other hardware such as kitchen video screen systems and peripherals such as printers and scanners.

This was a huge outlay of capital that the restaurant either had to come up with or pay off over time. If the restaurant struggled or went through a slump, as most did during the recent Covid-19 pandemic, the cost burden put them at a disadvantage.

With the up-front acquisition model, what would happen if something were to break, or if an operating system went end-of-life, forcing the obsolescence of the hardware a restaurant relied on to take orders and payment?

The restaurant may have had a support and service contract with the tech vendor to help with hardware swap-outs or onsite troubleshooting and repair.

Larger chains, on the other hand, might have been able to staff IT help desks that could apply updates and security patches, or send someone to swap out a bad terminal or printer.

Technology’s end of life simply meant the restaurant had to replace the outdated tech.

With the rise in digital commerce and integrations with third parties, there is a lot more that can go wrong, and a lot more for someone (maybe the restaurant’s IT desk or perhaps a district manager who is already wearing a lot of hats) to troubleshoot. Let’s face it, asking a local or district manager to handle one more thing – especially something mission-critical like your technology – can create risks and issues you don’t want to tackle. Even in-house IT departments find it difficult to recruit and retain the breadth of skills and expertise necessary to maintain the range of technology solutions.

“As-a-Service” at your service

An ‘as-a-service’ subscription model breaks up the technology costs into regular, predictable monthly payments similar to paying for a utility or for rent.

The predictable monthly payment frees up capital to invest in other areas of your restaurant. Maybe you want to sink some investment into an experimental virtual delivery-only concept that uses your existing kitchen facilities, during meal ‘shoulder’ times when your dining room business slows down. ‘As-a-service’ evens out your technology costs over time so you have some spare resources available to experiment.

In addition to hardware, some providers will include aspects of service and support, such as a remote help desk.

Other vendors, like PAR, go far beyond the basic phone-tree remote help desk support.

PAR recently released PAR Infinity Hardware-as-a-Service. Going beyond modern hardware, PAR Infinity takes a restaurant’s technology needs off the restaurateur’s plate by handling the entire technology life cycle, service, and support, end to end, outsourcing the technology and the expertise to manage and maintain it:

• Shipping: initial and return shipping
• Installation is managed by professional project managers and conducted by certified technicians
• Help desk available 24x7x365
• Field technicians to visit your location and make repairs
• Advance exchange of peripherals
• Remote diagnosis and troubleshooting of your underlying technology including the operating system and security components
• Disposal according to regulatory requirements

If you are interested in learning more about PAR Infinity Hardware-as-a-Service, please visit our website. Or contact us today.