Ever thought of building your own restaurant management system? Of course you haven’t. Yet, believe it or not, there are some operators that decide to do just this. As you might have guessed, throwing a system together with duct tape and a dream isn’t the most prudent of business decisions.
For those of you wondering why, here are six compelling reasons why creating an ePOS system from scratch is probably best avoided.
Creating a restaurant management system from scratch requires a comprehensive knowledge of databases, programming languages, front-end development, back-end development, mobile app development, website development, API integration, payment gateway integration, third-party system integration, accounting and financial integration, analytics integration, user authentication , UI/UX principles, cybersecurity, server management, supplier management, hosting management, health and safety compliance…the list goes on and on and on.
You can’t merely create and deploy your own system and have done with it. Extensive, sustained testing is required in order to avoid outages, downtime and other tech calamities that could bring your restaurant to its knees.
Keep in mind here, that even the biggest companies suffer from system failures from time to time. Take Amazon’s AWS for instance. In the past seventeen years, its servers have experienced 14 severe outages, of which one was global in scale. Only 14 in almost two decades? Pretty good-going right? Um, no. An estimated 1.45 billion businesses use the AWS cloud. That’s an awful lot of unhappy clients and customers.
So the sheer time and effort required to ensure your restaurant doesn’t befall a similar fate, effectively defeats the purpose of implementing a restaurant management system in the first place.
Without wishing to name names, we actually encountered an operator a while back who made the fateful decision to create an in-house solution to save costs. On paper at least, this makes sense. If you’re a tech genius with an extensive knowledge of all the skills mentioned in point 1 and/or only need a very limited POS solution, then yes, it’s possible to protect your margins with such an approach.
But let’s be real here. It’s no longer possible to get by with a simple POS framework that does the bare minimum. With the industry now as it is, mere survival depends on comprehensive tech platforms that integrate and manage all critical operations.
And achieving that on your own requires significant investment in the actual hardware. Then there’s the added expense of employing developers and engineers whose services you’ll invariably have to employ somewhere down the line.
Guarding against cyber threats is a never-ending battle with nefarious actors constantly coming up with new and ingenious ways to exploit systems. And most of aren’t all that particular about precisely which systems they bring down. Security is therefore a big challenge, especially if you’re trying to lock down a self-made tech stack. Why?
Because it will likely comprise numerous interconnected touch points. So a vulnerability in one component might very well expose others. Take your POS terminal, for example. It that becomes compromised, attackers may then steal payment information, while also gaining access to customer profiles.
Although a rather doom-laden scenario, it’s the kind of risk that’s becoming increasingly common in the F&B sector. A robust and regularly updated system is therefore essential.
Suffice it to say that a patched-together in-house tech ‘stack’ isn’t going to be terribly scalable. In fact, it would probably be easier to transport a house of cards in a hurricane blindfolded with oven gloves on. Self-made systems tend to struggle in this area for a number of reasons.
To begin with, the vast majority of restaurant owners lack the in-house know-how to create a scalable system from scratch that can also grow with the business if necessary. To get around this, components are often bolted on reactively.
But these don’t always integrate all that well with existing systems - dedicated restaurant inventory and analytics software are prime examples. As well as integration issues, they often require manual data exports and separate logins, leading to inconsistencies and data fragmentation (more of this later).
The same approach is often used with third-party delivery systems. Ever been at a coffee shop or QSR and witnessed staff fumbling about with multiple tablets to place orders? In all likelihood, the owners have decided to make use of Uber Eats or Deliveroo to help with delivery orders. The confused juggling you see front-of-house, is a result of this unfortunate strategic gambit.
So put simply, the more disparate systems you add, the more complicated, unreliable and unscalable your tech infrastructure becomes.
Okay so most operators who decide to get creative with their POS systems don’t actually start from scratch. Typically, they link together a disparate collection of platforms to perform different operational tasks - one system might be deployed at point of sale, another used for stock management and another for accounting.
Unfortunately, the data may be stored in different ways, especially when sourced from different providers. For example, one system might employ its own date or address naming conventions for keeping information, resulting in errors and misalignment during data exchange.
What’s more, if these systems aren’t properly integrated, the data tends to become inconsistent, often causing duplicate records, especially with POS, CRM and loyalty software. In absolute worse-case, and unfortunately very common, scenarios, the data gets siloed meaning that each system stores it’s own information which isn’t accessible to others.
And it really doesn’t matter if you’re using best-of-class software providers either. If their product doesn’t integrate well with other systems there’s not a whole lot you can do.
Thankfully, the roll-your-own method is about as rare as a comet devastating humanity – possibly because most owners understand that employing such an approach would have a similar impact on their restaurants. Instead, they rely on pre-built, self-driving systems that offer full operational coverage.
Taking each above point individually, we’ll now put forth our case as to why a ready-made cloud-based restaurant management system is an infinitely better option than a bespoke solution.
A ready-made restaurant management systems is easy to set up and manage. Absolutely no tech knowledge is required. Typically, installation is carried out by the provider and extensive support provided every step of the way. You don’t need a PHD in development, cyber security or any of the other areas exhaustively mentioned above. All of this is taken care of behind the scenes.
Some testing is obviously going to be required during installation to ensure proper operation and, potentially, seamless integration with existing tech infrastructure. But we’re not talking about end-to-end integrity checks here.
Pre-built systems are rigorously checked before being taken to market, with any debugging or stability monitoring handled by the provider. Once the system is up and running, all critical operations are streamlined, simplifying day-to-day tasks for your staff and giving you time to focus on growing your business.
Although some ready-made systems can prove a tad expensive, there are now plenty of affordable solutions that provide comprehensive integration and coverage without causing you to go bankrupt. Cloud-based systems are the most obvious example – they have lower upfront costs, require less hardware and usually operate on pay-as-you-go, subscription-based pricing models. This allows you to spread the costs over time.
Next-Gen restaurant management systems, cloud-based variants in particular, are extremely secure. State-of-the-art security technologies are utilised including firewalls, intrusion detection systems and end-to-end-encryption. Updates are handled by the providers while the systems themselves include automatic back-ups, as well as built-in redundancy. So if one system fails, another kicks in to prevent data loss.
Of the latest restaurant management systems, cloud-based products are by far the most scalable. Central to their elasticity is the way in which they’re structured. All customer and client data is stored on a remotely accessed system.
Not only can this be accessed via a single in-store dashboard, it can also be easily expanded to include additional locations. Thus, if you’re expanding to another venue, all that’s typically required are in-house peripherals such as the POS terminals, printers and card machines.
The subscription, pay-as-you-go approach mentioned previously, also allows you to add features as needed, while only paying for the services you use. The use of APIs (bridges between different systems) also makes it easy to add additional third-party services including loyalty, accounting and delivery platforms.
The data disconnect that bedevils hotch-potch and legacy systems is eliminated by all-in-one restaurant management systems. Critical operations relating to your POS, inventory, staff scheduling and online ordering processes are unified under a single platform with all data synced and updated in real-time. Logging on to different systems to access specific data is also a thing of the past thanks to centralisation – you have access to all critical data from one dashboard.
Hopefully our latest article has put to an end any fanciful notions you may have about creating your own in-house restaurant management platform. The challenges are legion, the pitfalls innumerable and the potential damage to your business incalculable. Really, the only sensible solution is to rely on a next-gen tech system in order to efficiently manage your restaurant’s operations.
Follow the link to learn more about one of the most sophisticated examples on the market!
https://www.syrve.com