Opening a restaurant isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s a complicated, daunting undertaking that’s made even more difficult by the volatile nature of the F&B industry.
Not surprisingly, a lot of budding restauranteurs are put off by the challenges and hurdles that await. But establishing a profitable eatery is entirely achievable with the right preparation and planning.
To set yourself up for long-term success, you'll need to master these five critical areas.
- Operational Cohesion
- Full Analytical Oversight
- Effective Team Management
- Advanced Menu Engineering
- Hyper-Personalisation
These form the bedrock of any successful F&B enterprise. And all of them now demand advanced tech. The kind of tech that integrates all of the above areas, together with their sub-processes, into a single, unified system. Here's how Syrve can help.
1. Operational Cohesion
The operational side of things tends to be centred round three, maybe four core areas depending on the restaurant: POS, inventory control, kitchen management and delivery. Integrating these is utterly critical to success. So to is your ability to manage them seamlessly.
POS System
An efficient, easy-to-use POS system is an absolute must for ensuring an efficient front-of-house operation. As a bare minimum requirement, the hardware should be easy to use, fast and reliable. Ideally, staff should also be able to easily promote menu items and take into account specific customer preferences such as dietary requirements.
.jpg?width=636&height=424&name=syrve-pos(1).jpg)
How Syrve Can Help
Syrve’s POS system features an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that simplifies order taking, while prompting staff with upselling suggestions and providing easy access to allergen information for each dish. This leads to reduced waiting times, happier customers and a front-of-house team that’s able to focus on other important tasks.
Inventory Control
Overstocking, stockouts and food waste are very common in the F&B industry and are the direct result of poor inventory management. And the consequences are often ruinous. This is why it’s so important to get this right from the very beginning.
How Syrve Can Help
Syrve streamlines the entire inventory management process. Utilising AI forecasting, the system automatically generates purchase orders to avoid over or understocking. It’s also possible to perform mobile inventory checks. This saves valuable time, eliminates human error and provides an accurate picture of your stock levels.
Kitchen Management
The kitchen is effectively the beating heart of your restaurant. So it obviously needs to be well managed and friction free. Food preparation should be efficient, consistent and of a high standard. Clear communication with the front-of-house team is also paramount. To avoid bottlenecks, a kitchen should have in place an intelligent system for handling orders.
How Syrve Can Help
Syrve has the potential to transform kitchen operations. To begin with, the system connects the kitchen with the FOH team by way of kitchen display screens that provide status updates and cooking countdowns. In turn, orders from multiple sources (website, in-house, delivery aggregator) are combined into a single pipeline for kitchen staff. For kitchen staff, prep and batch plans can be prepared automatically thanks to AI-driven forecasting.
Delivery
Although not suitable for every type of restaurants, a delivery service can be an absolute game-changer for many establishments. The food delivery market is now huge, offering operators the perfect opportunity to increase their market share by targeting a much larger customer base. Capitalising requires, among other things, an efficient ordering process, an integrated POS system and a robust logistical framework to ensure timely deliveries.
.png?width=626&height=417&name=delivery-map(1).png)
How Syrve Can Help
Syrve allows restaurants to exploit the delivery market with ease. You can set up your own in-house delivery service and/or rely on third-party delivery services such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo. Orders are injected directly into your production pipeline and can be managed on one system - there’s no need to rely on multiple tablets for different ordering services. Driver management is also made easier thanks to a suite of tools for plotting routes and tracking drivers via GPS.
2. Analytical Oversight
Without accurate forecasting and reporting, you’ll be running your restaurant blindfolded. To operate successfully, you need meaningful, actionable insights to help measure performance and predict future demand.
Forecasting
Proper forecasting eliminates guesswork, enabling you to optimise inventory levels, minimise waste and prepare for those spikes in demand. With a deeper understanding of sales fluctuations, you’ll be better far placed to create optimised staff schedules (see below) as well as optimised food prep plans.
How Syrve Can Help
Syrve's AI restaurant forecasting engine analyses historical sales data, to accurately predict future income and likely top sellers. External events such as holidays, events and weather conditions can also be factored in. Based on these forecasts, Syrve creates prep and batch plans, while optimising your inventory, so that you don’t overstock or run out of ingredients.
Reporting
To gauge the performance of your restaurant and to improve day-to-day productivity, you’ll need a high-res picture of the data that matters most to your business, preferably in real-time. Revenue and costs are obviously the most important KPIs here. But you’ll need the granular details too, such as ingredient costs, delivery prices and service/kitchen performance.
.png?width=636&height=424&name=analytics(1).png)
How Syrve Can Help
Syrve provides a 360-degree view of your data with more than 200 business metrics that are accessible via a single dashboard. It’s possible to track operational profit and loss, monitor inventory levels, access sales data and keep tabs of labour costs - all of this is available in real time. In addition to a broad-picture analysis, you can focus on specific operational areas relating to menu engineering, supplier management and cost management.
3. Effective Staff Management
It’s one thing getting staff on board. Managing them is another thing altogether. Given the high staff turnover rates in the F&B sector, getting this right has become absolutely essential. Restaurant team management encompasses a number of elements including rota planning, goal setting, performance monitoring and attendance management. Team morale is another critically important area.
Staff Scheduling
With labour costs as they are, it's never been more important to ensure your staff numbers match customer demand. The F&B sector is of course renowned for sales fluctuations - to save money, it's therefore critical to create rotas that closely align with your cost of labour. Without tech, this is easier said than done.
How Syrve Can Help
With the help of AI-driven sales analysis. Syrve enables you to clearly see the number of employees you need for any given shift. It's also possible to create dynamic staff rotas that display your actual labour costs as you make adjustments - in terms of budget management, this can be of enormous benefit.
Staff Engagement and Morale
On top of high labour costs and workforce shortages, the F&B industry has to endure high turnover rates. The most effective way to insulate your business from this long-standing problem is to ensure a happy, motivated team. But in an industry where the hours are long and the workload intense, this can be a major challenge.
How Syrve Can Help
Staff engagement is critical for improving and maintaining morale. To this end, Syrve allows you to create personal pages for employees. These include a company news feed that keeps staff updated about developments, and performance target tools for setting and keeping track of personal goals. In addition, each team member has easy access to their rotas.
4. Advanced Menu Engineering
Your menu will determine the success or failure of your restaurant. In addition to being well designed and suitably priced, it should align with your kitchen capacity, your inventory and of course, customer demand.
Menu Analysis
Given how volatile ingredient prices have become, effective menu analysis is now a baseline industry requirement. So, you'll need to know your most profitable dishes so they can be promoted while the poor sellers can be removed. You'll also need to have a handle on the costs of each dish along with the ingredients and the labour expenses involved in preparation.
How Syrve Can Help
Syrve’s menu management tools help you to achieve this by revealing the true cost of each dish based on ingredients and labour time. With this data, the system then ranks the dishes according to profitability. By utilising powerful ABC/XYZ analysis, Syrve groups menu items according to sales volume, turnover and profit. With the ability to easily remove dishes to prevent waste, while promoting best sellers, you'll be in a position to fine tune your menu and balance cost, quality and customer satisfaction.
Recipe Management
Without clear recipe guidelines, dish consistency and quality invariably suffers leading to dissatisfied customers. In the kitchen, over-portioning or the use of incorrect ingredients can generate waste. And operations often slow down as staff waste time trying to work out the correct proportions. For new starters or temporary staff, their inexperience exacerbates these problems further. Clearly, a sound recipe management strategy is required.
How Syrve Can Help
In keeping with Syrve's core architecture, its recipe management system is completely centralised. This means that you can store and share your recipes among chefs and new starters - everybody has easy access, whether you run a single operation or a large restaurant chain. It's possible to store key information about key dishes, batches and semi-finished items. Every single change you make is instantly updated across the system.
Menu Pricing
In the restaurant industry, business agility demands an informed, flexible approach to menu pricing. It's the only way to strike the right balance between protecting your margins and staying competitive. But demand fluctuates, ingredient prices remain volatile and customers tend to be price sensitive. Pricing strategies therefore need to be driven by solid data and dynamic technology.
How Syrve Can Help
Because Syrve ensures that you understand the true cost of every dish (see Menu Analysis above), you'll be able to confidently adjust prices to absorb these costs as you see fit. Price changes can be scheduled for specific times of the day, in advance of special events or to reflect time-sensitive offers. Changes can be instantly rolled out across entire chains or for individual stores.
5. Hyper-Personalisation
It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, customer satisfaction is key to success. In the F&B sector, a quality end product is of course important. But driving customer engagement and retention is just as critical. These days, it's all about hyper-personalisation. In other words, you'll need to take a data-driven approach in order to satisfy customer expectations.
Hyper-Engagement
Today, satisfying customer expectations is all about creating engaging, memorable experiences. In addition to restaurant theming and dish presentation, you'll need to personalise your service. Loyalty programs, customised discounts and a recognition of personal milestones are key. Delivering these demands access to meaningful data.
.jpg?width=636&height=424&name=Incontent9%20(1).jpg)
How Syrve Can Help
Syrve includes an assortment of tools that can assist in this area. In terms of relationship building, the platform lets you add the details of guests to a database whenever they make a reservation. If they use your establishment for a birthday celebration, the system will remember this, so you can offer a more personalised experience next time.
Subscription tools are also included that allow you to stay connected. In addition, you can provide click and collect, mobile and online ordering for restaurants and delivery services. Not only does this broaden the appeal of your restaurant, it also means that you’ll be offering convenience.
Hyper-Convenience
These days, customer convenience is all about speed, efficiency, personalisation (see above) and dining flexibility. For restaurant operators, this means providing seamless ordering and payment solutions, a fast service and online ordering options. Achieving all of these, demands advanced all-in-one platforms. Fragmented, patched together systems are no longer enough.
How Syrve Can Help
Syrve features intuitive, easy-to-use POS terminals and handheld devices that allow staff to take orders quickly. Contactless payment functionality is also included to ensure speedy transactions. And to satisfy the growing demand for online ordering, Syrve, as we have seen, can integrate some of the leading third party delivery services. This is supported by an easy-to-use website builder which allows you to create a website with ease.
Learn more about Syrve’s advanced restaurant management platform: https://www.syrve.com
