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The future’s digital. The future’s paperless

Paper should finally be consigned to the restaurant rubbish bin. It’s time for your dining room to get digital.

As a society, we’re going paperless – its inevitable and there’s no slowing its progress. Thanks to innovations in technology, we’re now able to do almost anything digitally from our phones, tablets and laptops. Paper is going out of fashion. Already we’re seeing the demise of paper boarding passes, paper train tickets, paper books – and even paper money with the rise in contactless payments. So why should this be any different in restaurants?

Moving from a paper-based to a paperless restaurant operation can be as simple as a restaurant deep clean. De-cluttering table plans, order tickets and reservation notes can move the chaos from a restaurant, eradicating inefficiencies and inaccuracies to achieve operational excellence.

Exploiting digital solutions in a restaurant can save time, money and errors. Imagine you have five waiting staff working a six-hour shift. On average they’ll make 10 trips to the kitchen per hour to check if an order is ready, taking two minutes per trip – that means an operators front of house team is wasting over 10 hours per shift, just on heading backwards and forwards to the pass. Put plainly, if staff were upselling to customers, selling on average £20 worth of additional food and drink per hour, a restaurant would take an extra £200 per day, £1,400 per week – that’s an incredible £73,000 per year!

So how do you keep front-of-house teams doing what they do best – upselling and ensuring a memorable experience? Operators in the know use a mixture of taking orders through an electronic device that are sent directly to the kitchen, coupled with a pager, which allows chefs to inform FOH teams when orders are ready.

The next step in the paperless journey has to involve the reservation book. A single electronic book removes the need for any written calendars, diaries and notes. The beauty of this system is that it makes reservations easier to handle, audit and review, irrespective of whether the reservation is being made online or by phone – it can all be managed from one centralised office. The collaboration of data from party contacts, preferences or event information is invaluable in assisting teams dealing with real-time issues – such as cancelled parties, multiple orders or extra attendees.

In the past I have witnessed restaurants actually using A3 pieces of paper to draw table layouts to map out bookings. Thankfully, we’ve come a long way since those days and current table management technology is streamlining restaurant operations to organise not only the seating of customers but wait lists, servers and sections, while also collecting key analytical data on trends in the business.

Technology working in harmony is a thing to behold. The coalition of digital pathways from reservations, POS, customer insights, kitchen automation and capacity management are powerful tools. Operators, from independents to multi-sites, can join the digital revolution to ensure our future is really paperless.

Comments made by Ashley Sheppard, Sales and Marketing Director of CST, in the May issue of Restaurant Magazine.