WHY INVESTING IN

TECHNOLOGY
Is Essential For Multi-brand
Restaurants To Thrive

The Restaurant Times TM

INTRODUCTION

Expanding their restaurant network is what most restaurateurs dream of. It's
probably one of the reasons why you're here reading this E-book. As the
owner of a successful restaurant, you already know that the restaurant indus-
try has as many opportunities to grow as to fail. This means it gives you as
much opportunity and growth as much as you aspire to. Understanding what
it takes to open a second venture helps you plan your workflows better and
thus make balanced decisions. The significant part of opening your second
venture is you already know where to get your funds from, what works with
your customers, and other operational insights. What you need to take care
of is maintaining consistency across outlets.

Thus, technology plays a crucial role in scaling up your business. We would

look at the multiple aspects where technology can help you scale up your
restaurant brand at a later stage.

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But before that, we must understand the challenges multi-unit managers face. From
maintaining a constant balance between all the outlets to ensuring consistency in
customer experiences, a manager needs to take care of it all. Let's dig into each of
these challenges, one by one.

Constantly Analyzing Overall Performance:

The problem with handling multiple brands is that the two brands
could perform entirely differently when it comes to generating reve-
nue and acquiring new customers. Analyzing the overall performance
of your brands needs a deep understanding of how well each brand
is performing, which in turn means a lot depending on data.

Ensuring Consistency in Customer Experience:

Customers today expect unique experiences more than anything
else. Every little thing, including the entrance of your restaurant, the
colors used in your interiors, the way your staff behaves and the way
your food is presented, contributes to it. Any customer who would
want to come back to your brand would look for the same experi-
ence. If they don't find it in your new outlets, you tend to lose out on
future business.

Maintaining Communication:
Another everyday challenge for a multi-brand owner is maintaining
consistent communication. Efficiency in operations, consistency in
service, and higher revenue generation are all results of efficient
internal communication between the back of house and front-end
operations. A restaurateur always needs to ensure that he/she has an
integrated technology platform for this purpose.

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TECHNOLOGY:
The Savior
The restaurant industry has gone through so many changes in the past couple of
years, that it's challenging for upcoming brands or even successful brands to survive.
The reason why the changes have happened is utterly external to the restaurant
space. Factors like the quality of food, ambiance, and quality of customer service are
being influenced by technology. From digital wallets to restaurants offering loyalty
points and rewards to keep customers coming back, the technology footprint has
started to dominate the restaurant industry.

Any restaurateur around the globe now understands the importance of processes
and streamlined operations through technology. While opening a restaurant, every-
one wants to be accessible, acquire more customers, and grow in the least possible
time.

However, the harsh reality is only a mere 40% of restaurants survive their first year
of operations.

The beauty of restaurant technology is that it is not only limited to billing and taking
orders. It streamlines your kitchen operations, optimizes the time taken for you to
prepare dishes, controls customer wait times, and helps your restaurant deliver
online orders in time.

The most critical role of technology in the F&B space has evolved to create processes
in all of your operations. This has paved the way for multi-brand restaurant brands to
grow to their maximum potential. Restaurateurs can now manage all of their outlets

03
 through one integrated platform,
without having to look at multiple
reports. Data-driven insights have
made e running targeted marketing
campaigns measuring the perfor-
mance of a specific brand among mul-
tiple ones a whole lot easier. Restaura-
teurs undoubtedly consider technolo-
gy as their savior today!
01. Simplify Managing Each unit
The most common worry of a
multi-brand restaurant owner is divid-
ing his time and attention between
each of his operational units. Even
after bringing in restaurant technolo-
gy, some restaurateurs get over-
whelmed with their responsibilities.
One possible reason for the chaotic
management could be that your tech-
nology platform is not able to simplify
things for you.
Deployment Brand
BFCD
Model
Clusters Format
he most simplified way of managing
multiple restaurant outlets is to cate-
gorize them on four levels: Brand,
Format, Cluster( Region), and Deploy-
ment (Unit), also called the BFCD
model. Let’s first understand why
there was a need to categorize multi
brand restaurants to manage them.
Imagine a scenario where a company
owns around 15-16 brands. These
brands are present inside a mall, in a
food court, or as standalone restau-
rants at a high street, or as food truck.
The working of these brands is entire-
ly different, which means they’d need
different ways to manage or different
strategies for them to work.
The categorisation is done for two
major reasons, managing taxes and
menus for different brands, formats
and locations.
These four categories help restaura-
teurs to look at the bigger picture for
each brand, and make strategic deci-
sions, based on data. For instance, a
brand might work differently depend-
ing on the geographical locations, and
format. The same menu can’t be
offered at all of them. Therefore, you
need to be able to determine relevant
taxes and strategies on each of the
brand, cluster, format and location.
It helps save a whole lot of time for
restaurateurs. Be it running a new
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 campaign or starting a new dish in one
particular location; everything could
now be done in a click!
02. Easy Replication Of Strategies
Across Outlets/ Locations
Different outlets and brands work
differently in terms of footfall, market-
ing campaigns, and even their price
points. Now, let's assume a scenario
where a restaurateur needs to run a
particular marketing campaign, or a
special menu at one of its outlets, or
across outlets in the same location.
Without an integrated and organized
platform, he would need to spend
hours analyzing the performance of
each outlet and then run a marketing
strategy there. All this time is saved by
bringing in the right technology solu-
tion.
An ideal POS helps you by giving you a
separate categorization based on spe-
cific characteristics we talked about
earlier. Based on the classification, a
restaurateur can quickly choose a
particular location and change/apply
new strategies there.
Let’s understand this better with the
help of an example. Lite Bite Foods is
one of the biggest F&B retail compa-
nies in India. The company has 22
owned and 9 managed brands under
its name, with a cumulative total of
more than 200 outlets. Such a huge
range of brands, needs to be handled
efficiently for it to grow.
Let’s take two of its brands into con-
sideration here, Punjab Grill and Bar
Bar. The former is a casual dine
restaurant with North Indian as its
speciality whereas the latter is a
restrobar with a totally different
customer base. The menus, prices
and taxes vary for each of the brands.
Without the right technology, you
would have to manually calculate
taxes and menus for each of the
brands.
Thus, you need the BFCD model incor-
porated into your restaurant POS to
take care of the chaos. You can change
the menu and taxes for each brand or
cluster with just one click. It saves
your business a whole lot of time and
reduces dependence on employees.-
Such a precise system would also min-
imize the possibility of any human
errors.
03. Delegate Responsibility
Another important thing you need to
take care of while managing multiple
brands is how to delegate responsibili-
ty effectively. Ideally, you can have
your management staff at three
levels, Enterprise, brand and cluster.
The benefit of a BFCD model incorpo-
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rated in your POS is that you can easily
assign one of your management staff
members as a brand head or a cluster
head. The roles and permissions of
each of your Brand head or Cluster
(Regional) head are already assigned
to each of them. The system will only
give you as many permissions as may
need to be assigned to a brand head.
Above all of them is the Enterprise
head, or the supreme head. He/she
has the rights to introduce or remove
any dish centrally or change the prices
of a particular dish at a particular clus-
ter. Basically, the enterprise head is
the central authority.
The next comes a Brand head. It is
possible that the same person is
responsible for handling two brands,
and it is also possible that two people
are given the same brand under differ-
ent formats or clusters. The explicit
categorization helps restaurateurs to
understand which person can handle
which sort of brand at which format.
He/she can only make changes at the
brand level.
The next in order of delegation comes
the Cluster head, who is responsible
for managing a separate cluster. Since
the division of clusters is totally a busi-
ness owner’s choice, there could be
different kinds of clusters. For
instance, there could be a South
Indian cluster, a North Indian cluster
or even two clusters for the same
state.
04. Better Analysis Of Your
Brand's Performance
A successful restaurateur always relies
on data to make decisions. Without
data, he's just a restaurateur with
strong opinions. Operational decisions
based on data lead to growth. Thus,
obtaining the right reports, in time, is
one of the main concerns for a
multi-brand restaurant owner. The
amount of data that we are talking
about here is enormous since it con-
tains information to the very outlet
level.
Your restaurant POS must ideally
provide you with different kinds of
analysis, be it a graphical representa-
tion, or even a pie chart. It must have
several ways to indicate the overall
performance of your restaurant
brand. Different representation of
data makes it crystal clear for you to
take further actions.
One such instance is from a brand Byg
Brewsky in Bangalore. In spite of
excellent service from their staff
members, the customers often com-
plained about the time they took to
deliver food to the table. When the
06
 restaurant owner, Pravesh Pandey,
and the team looked into their data,
including the food preparation time
and delivery time, all the timelines
were met. Technically, there was no
lag from their staff's end.

Using their massive data and integrat-

ed reports through their POS, they
could figure out an everyday item that
was the primary reason for dissatis-
fied customers. Their pizza, which was
also their bestseller item, was taking
25 minutes to be delivered. Using this
information, the restaurateur brought
in dough-mixing equipment, which
reduced the time made for its prepa-
ration from 25 minutes to 10 minutes.

05. Understand Customer 06. Manage Your Recipe Centrally

Behavior Better
Different segments of your restaurant
brand have separate target audiences.
One brand may have distinct restau-
rant formats catering to separate
audiences. Understanding each of
your audience groups is crucial to
serving them with what they want.
Restaurant technology paves the way
for you to understand your customer
behavior better. The frequency of
their orders, the times when they like
to visit, and their most ordered items
can be regularly analyzed using your
restaurant technology.
The primary reason why people stick
to a particular brand is the quality of
food, along with the experience they
get. Thus, consistency in your recipes
is one of the critical factors determin-
ing growth. For a business with multi-
ple brands and formats, recipe data
must be maintained centrally.
Central recipe management makes it
easy for the restaurateur to add a few
items or modify a particular dish in
one go. Since all of your data is on the

07
 cloud, all of your outlets are instantly
notified in case of any change made to
the recipe on a given day.

07. Central Kitchen Management

Another critical area of operations is
the central kitchen. As a multi-brand
owner, your kitchen needs to be
explicitly sorted for other processes to
fall in place. Having the right technolo-
gy partner makes it easier for all your
outlet kitchens to coordinate with
your central kitchen.

A central kitchen management system

is fluent is transferring orders to the
right outlet within seconds of it being
placed. Along with that, it comes with
a Kitchen Display System that reflects
the order immediately and has the
approximate time written next to each
item. This way, both preparation and
delivery can be optimized.

All in all, technology has changed the

way restaurants work. Restaurateurs
now use technology in every opera-
tional area to generate maximum
revenue. It offers maximum growth
opportunities when it comes to
multi-brand restaurants with enor-
mous untapped potential.

08
 Streamline
Multi-Brand Management
With The Right Technology Partner
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