Restaurant Communications

http://www.htmagazine.com/HT/archive/0907/0907_03.html

My article this week deals with communications in restaurants and how technology is completely changing them. The article described three main issues that are covered with the new technology. Theses issues are how to cut costs, how to turn the table over faster and how to improve customer’s experiences. It was broken down into examples of restaurant doing one of them things. The first was cutting costs. The example they used was Zaxby’s, a restaurant within the southeastern states. They use a predictive kitchen management service called HyperActive Bob to organize the food orders. Zaxby’s prides themselves on cooking customers’ food after they order it. HyperActive helps keep those orders under control. It actually predicts what types of meals need to be made by the post and current trends and from the customer counts. It has saved the Zaxby’s Restaurant $4,700 a year on waste alone. The next issue they discussed was the increase in table turnover times. The restaurant used in this example is Brennan’s of Houston. They began using Guest Bridges Reserve, a guest management system. This system helps the hostess mostly to be able to manage the tables on a busy night. It assigns different time values to the tables based on the size of the table or the meals they guests order. It also tracks the guest’s history to create a better personalized experience. The final issue is improving the guest’s experience. The Fatz Café has created a wireless system as a paging system. The servers/hostesses/kitchen workers all wear watch-like pagers to be paged. The customers can page their server if they need a refill or silverware. The hostesses are paged when table are cleaned and open by the bus boys and finally the kitchen workers can page the servers when their meals are done. Fatz Café has seen a great improvement for the customers. Customers do not have to wait as long for tables, receive their meals quicker and feel as if they waiters are doing what they can for them.

I believe that all of these ideas are great for the restaurant industry. The prediction of what meals need to be made or may need to be made is amazing to me. The fact that a restaurant has created a system like this is amazing and will help them tremendously. Also the guest management system is a great idea. If there is anything to cut down on a wait time for guests that is going to be great for the guests and the restaurant. I have heard a lot of information on the wireless devices in restaurants. I really believe this is the future of restaurants. The pager system is great for the customers to call the servers, for the hostess to be alerted and the kitchen staff to alert the servers. I believe this would do nothing but great things for a restaurant. More restaurants should input this into their restaurants. I am going to look into all of these systems because I find them very interesting. Technology in hotels is discussed a lot but it is interesting to hear about how restaurants are also upgrading and using this new technologies.