Restaurant management is an intense job as managers are responsible for all aspects within the restaurant. A good restaurant owner understands the business side, what the front of the house does, and what the back of the house entails, as well as having managers report to them from the kitchen and floor. Information on staffing, target revenue, inventory levels, customer purchasing habits, and much more are always on the mind of a restaurant owner.
Previously, those tasks required hours of staff time poured over logs, receipts, and payroll. However, in today’s technologically-advanced world, a cloud-based network inside a restaurant brings a seemingly endless supply of data to the fingertips of owners, management, and staff alike.
We’re all familiar with the pos software that can track sales, the percentage of sales spent on beverages, how many enchilada plates were sold in a week, and the like. This exact kind of tracking can be expanded to the entire restaurant with cloud-based ordering and kitchen displays.
The kitchen, however, would be the place you would find the most benefit and cost reduction from using a cloud-based network in your restaurant. Beyond displaying orders digitally rather than the traditional pen and paper, cooler and pantry levels could also be easily monitored from a central location at the click of a button.
Evaluating customer trends will give insight for ideal inventory levels, reducing waste from over purchasing. Inventory management has been proven to reduce overall inventory and reduce your cost of goods sold.
In a fully integrated restaurant, inventory that comes in is logged, then stored as usual. When used, items are noted in the system, as well. The front of the house uses a POS system tracking open tables and reservation scheduling, telling the servers what to expect on the screens of their workstations. Here, the servers enter drink and food orders, which are sent to the respective stations for production.
After the customer has completed their meal, they can even be offered tableside payment options. While not all of this is needed in every restaurant, most can benefit from implementing one or two techniques.
While this may seem burdensome to employees to access a computer system regularly, the benefits are clear, even for the employee. The information gained from kitchen cloud-based networks is incredibly valuable. The detailed information allows for the reduction of excess spending for the business, leading to higher success for all employees.
Some restaurants have adopted this idea to the extreme and have become take-out or delivery only and only accept order online. These cloud kitchens are becoming increasingly popular. Additionally, the cloud feature allows franchised restaurants to communicate with one another or allows top-level management to view sales for every location, regardless of where they are.
Overall, the best way to manage a modern kitchen in a restaurant is to have a cloud-based network operating various avenues of information. A simple laptop or pos hardware is all you need to access mountains of information regarding every detail of your restaurant. Expanding beyond the typical pos software is essential for expanding and growing your restaurant. The information available is only limited by the systems not implemented.
