How to audit your restaurant tech stack

Introduction

With so many parts of the business impacted by the right or wrong tech, it can be difficult to decide whether to invest in new tech.

With the pressure to deliver increased revenue and footfall and the demands of ambitious expansion plans, you can’t afford to waste time and money on inefficient tech. Yet 56% of restaurant operators have frustrations with their POS provider, a number that rises to a staggering 87% for the largest business size.

It’s not impossible to have a restaurant tech stack that actually delivers the efficiency, revenue and success it was meant to. Forward-thinking brands like McDonald’s, LEON and GAIL’s are all powering tech-led growth despite consistently tough trading conditions.

It’s a matter of choosing the right tech setup for your unique business requirements, with the right partner that’s invested in your success.

But before you can even consider a new investment, you have to determine whether your existing technology is serving its purpose and allowing you to grow your business.

01. Understand your current tech stack and identify inefficiencies

Before you can make meaningful decisions around any changes to your tech stack, you need to fully understand your current setup.

With the huge amount of tech suppliers and combinations out there, this can be a more complicated task than it first appears.

We recommend spending time analysing your current tech stack from top to bottom and literally drawing it out element by element. This will give you a more thorough and realistic view of the tech you’re using and how it might be affecting the efficiency of your operation.

STEP 1

Start by drawing out exactly how many providers you work with, circling around your POS in the middle. Once you’ve determined how many providers contribute to your tech stack, the next step is to work out exactly what they deliver.

STEP 2

Break the providers down into the separate services they deliver and label each one.

You might find yourself adding more dots to your drawing as you break the providers’ services down. One provider might deliver all your digital ordering channels, but these should be broken down into each separate channel e.g. “Kiosks” and “Click & Collect”.

STEP 3

Draw lines connecting each element to reflect any integrations that need to happen to make them work. For example, does your loyalty scheme need separate integrations to each of your order channels (app, website, offline paper-based)? How does your KMS integrate with your channels?

Then you can identify inefficiencies within this setup. Where are integrations costing your team excessive time? What points in your operation are being overcomplicated by multiple providers?

For example:

• How long does it take to update multiple menus across channels?
• How long does it take to collate sales data from across your sites and order channels?
• How easy is it to create management reports across your operation to understand performance and identify areas for improvement?
• How long does adding new order channels or locations to your tech stack take?

FINAL STEP: Understand your business goals

Consider how tech aligns with your business goals and targets. Identify within your current tech stack exactly what is stopping you from achieving these, and map any new tech against how it will drive your business to succeed.

The first and arguably most important consideration when deciding on new tech is to ask: how will the tech improve efficiency across my entire operation? All vendors will claim to improve efficiency, so your job as the buyer is to investigate and validate that claim.

Think about the support you receive across your tech stack too, and how this will impact your ability to meet your business goals. Which of your providers understand your business targets, and are actively working to meet them? How many tech vendors provide support for a single aspect of your business? If you experienced downtime, how quickly were these issues resolved and what was the financial impact?