Recent events have challenged restaurants and food services industries to be flexible, adaptive, and more aware that being able to anticipate what’s to come is a vital component for staying competitive in the present. It’s also taught the industry that that status quo and the legacy systems that prop up outdated assumptions work directly against those efforts. A movement towards digitalization that has been happening over the last few years and embraced by restaurant and food service industry leaders has helped businesses to build a solid foundation for success.
Cloud infrastructure, SaaS, and cloud technology for restaurants and food services deployed to all brand locations has helped organizations to address the seismic shift that the industry is facing right now. How has this technology done this? How do the challenges and successes of the present point the way to resilience in the future? Let’s take a look.
Faster strategy and reaction times
The advent of social distancing has tested the limits of restaurants and food services businesses, making efforts to redefine ways of serving guests the number one priority. The ones who have done that the best have been the ones who are best able to rally their efforts across all locations from corporate to franchisee-owned spaces. Many aspects of the business delivered via cloud has come into play here, from operational adjustments to marketing and communications, adhering to standards to keep staff and guests safe while still managing to deliver the services that consumers demand.
Beyond our specific context in this current era, the cloud has always enabled faster reaction times and quicker strategy roll outs including “above store” item menu management, web-based reporting, simultaneous price adjustments, and more. Cloud technology for restaurants has been a proven approach to get locations out of their siloes, to remove the challenges and expense that come with on-site servers and bring all of them into a common ecosystem. This has made it easier for businesses to benefit from a more centralized way to create strategies, implement new ways to serve guests better, roll out action plans to all locations, and to monitor results to continue to build competitive momentum.
Greater intelligence, scalability
The deciding factor to weathering times of disruption is that sense of unity where all restaurant locations, brands, food services concepts are concerned, enjoying centralized support. This is what cloud infrastructure represents. Within that, and with more and more emphasis on business data, analysis, and intelligence as the key fuel to more informed strategies, innovative industry leadership revolves around finding the key narratives in transactional data, and turning them into action so as to scale the business in alignment to where the trends are pointing.
This can take many forms, from guest ordering and payment preferences, to menu items that are consistently popular, ones that are rising stars, and others that may need to be retired. When the data that flows in from all locations can be easily segmented above store, and can then be shared in real or near-real time on the web and on personal devices wherever decision-makers are, the potential for faster and more efficient actions increases exponentially. With greater intelligence and an increased ability to scale operations and an offering along with them, businesses are able to get a clearer picture of the ideal guest, too; what they want, how they prefer to get it, and what those ideal guests are likely to seek out in the future.
A solid basis for ongoing success in this decade
Centralized operations and reporting enabled by multi-tenant cloud infrastructure to support restaurants and food services organizations location-wide has been an emerging trend that will only deepen into this decade. As more fluid guest experience centered around mobile-based technology, and a higher demand for delivery and pick up gather momentum, the cloud is enabling greater efficiency, and a greater capacity to adapt as things change. In this, the cloud helps organizations be ready for a new normal.
What are some of the essential factors that continue to influence how restaurants and food service will stay resilient? We’ve created a resource that outlines the elements that forward-thinking organizations are implementing right now to ensure resilience for the long-term.
And, as always, contact ICCG to help provide you with insight and information. Schedule a complimentary consultation to review your questions.