The hospitality industry, like any industry, benefits from digitisation and automation. Apicbase partner Yollty, a loyalty software based in Luxembourg, takes a closer look at the critical areas of digital transformation in hospitality.
New technologies that optimise workflows are emerging and help restaurateurs maximize their restaurant’s efficiency and profit margins while minimizing costs.
Digitization of workflows increased especially due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As employees were forced to work from home, businesses were forced to adapt to the changing climate of corporate office work. They implemented software solutions to facilitate the transition from in-person to remote workflows. The pandemic taught us that digital transformation of workflows can boost productivity and performance, affecting a business’s ROI.
According to an article by McKinsey & Co, businesses see an average of 5% to 10% growth in revenue by adopting digital technologies that enable data analytics and automation. Furthermore, these revenue gains may either be restricted to the same margins, or even improved due to optimizations in workflows and processes that reduce marginal costs. Such results are typically seen in the first few months of adopting a digital solution, enabling fast and effective ROI.
The software provides various tools and features such as sales analytics reporting, inventory management, menu engineering and ingredients tracking, allowing restaurateurs to manage their resources precisely and reliably.
Moreover, with the help of data aggregation and analysis, restaurant owners know what parts of their business are underperforming, whether they be food quality, sale frequency, or customer experience related.
Software that can help you manage your restaurant includes Apicbase and Yollty. They provide modular software platforms customized to your specific workflow needs and are purpose-built for F&B businesses.
5 Key Areas For Faster ROI
We identified 5 main components of digitization, that when utilized, result in greater and faster returns on investment. A better ROI is achieved, and business operations and efficiency are improved, resulting in compounded success and a healthier workplace.
To learn more about improving your business’s ROI, consider the following features of digitizing the hospitality industry:
1. Menu engineering, automation and tracking
With digitization software such as Apicbase, restaurateurs can speed up recipe development and menu production for their restaurants, with powerful features such as instant recipe costing, profit potentials, aggregated nutritional data, and precise allergen information.
These features allow restaurateurs to improve their menu production, and whether your restaurant is picking up, or it’s been well-established for years, you can be sure to swiftly output recipes for your menu by eliminating manual tasks such as nutritional value calculations, allergen research, and optimizing food portion sizes since platforms like Apicbase do the heavy lifting for you. Moreover, automating these processes allows you to focus on what matters more, like brainstorming new recipe ideas, and solutions to improve your customer experiences and employee workplace.
Digitization of these processes enables another vital benefit for restaurants having multiple branches across different geographical locations. With platforms like Apicbase, you can create and store recipes in the cloud, complete with step-by-step instructions to prepare your meals, so all your outlets have consistent instructions for each recipe. This ensures food consistency across branches, allowing restaurateurs to update and add new recipes in real-time, without worrying about taking long hours to consolidate their menus.
Furthermore, menu automation features mitigate menu costs, incurred every time updates are made to food menus, whether you add, subtract or revise items. These are reduced by auto-generated menus, automatic costing, and simultaneous cloud updates that make rolling out updated menus across all your restaurant branches swift and easy.
With data aggregation and global repositories of recipe information, digitization allows for generating recipes through artificial intelligence. Using ingredients that you specify, artificial intelligence programs can develop recipes based on globally aggregated data and aid in the R&D phase of menu development.
Opting for menu engineering and recipe development software is a surefire way to see rapid ROI since you’ll save precious time by eliminating menial tasks from your workflow.
2. Automating inventory management and inventory acquisition
Digitization can enable automatic inventory management for restaurants struggling with keeping up with the daily inflow and outflow of raw materials. Restaurants have to deal with large volumes of orders daily, making it necessary to know the quantity of any given material at any time, to replace it as soon as possible.
With software such as Apicbase, keeping track of inventory is a breeze with daily rundowns of how much stock was used and how much is needed, instant access to real-time stock levels, conversion of ingredients to stockable goods, and alerts to time-sensitive stocking options.
Digitization can save you precious time and resources, allowing managers to reduce labour costs by handing over menial counting and tracking tasks to software processing. Software tracking also allows for greater accuracy in stock maintenance, eliminating human error and keeping you updated with precise and reliable data, that powers critical management decisions.
To further facilitate stocking and inventory tracking, Apicbase allows users to update inventory by utilizing QR codes to scan each item’s information directly into your restaurant’s database. This speeds up the data entry process exponentially and allows for strategic and useful resource allocation to other operations.
Apicbase and other digital transformation platforms also draw up precise billing amounts for automatically generated lists of groceries and essential items your restaurant needs. These automated processes save time and speed up the supply chain process of acquiring necessary goods. In addition, digitization also allows restaurateurs to place orders for raw materials directly through the platform. Apicbase allows this and supports automated requests for delivery with supported vendors, truly automating the process of acquiring essential goods, with minimal human input.
3. Sales analytics and data-driven decision making
Ever wonder how useful it would be to have a repository of all the data your restaurant generates? Whether it pertains to sales numbers, item performance, customer feedback, or potential margins, the digital transformation of your restaurant resource management system will give insights into how well your menu items are performing and what your customers’ spending habits could indicate about your current sales strategies. With such insights, you can zero in on which items generate the most sales, which items underperform, and which ones to revise or remove from your menu, helping you curate and optimize the best food items.
Using the power of data analytics, restaurateurs can make data-backed decisions that let them optimize their menus for better performance, and learn where there are dips in quality so improvement can be made. With regular financial reporting, restaurateurs get constant feedback about their monetary gains. Trends are highlighted through graphs, which can be studied for further insight, resulting in informed decision-making that would be impossible without recording essential, everyday sales data.
Data analytics is widely used in every industry and is extremely important due to its high ROI potential. With data analytics, you can see patterns and opportunities otherwise unnoticeable, which give your business a decisive edge over competitors. Drafting strategies informed by these insights, and implementing them effectively can mean the difference between a successful business in the long-term or not.
With a data recording platform like Apicbase, you can store all your sales data in one place, accessible through the cloud at any branch. Access to this aggregated data allows better employee communication and customer dealing by helping employees understand customer dynamics and build a unified brand voice. Moreover, you can be assured of its security with encryption that prevents third-party entities from accessing your business’s confidential information.
4. Loyalty programs and customer retention techniques
Digitally transforming your F&B business also opens up opportunities for customer loyalty programs. Digital loyalty programs are easily accessible via phone apps like Yollty, and allow customers to avail their favourite restaurants’ promotional deals. These loyalty programs target your most frequent customers, who act as brand ambassadors for your business, spreading positive reviews and experiences about your restaurant.
What makes applications like Yollty so worthwhile are their user-friendly interfaces and experiences that make it simple and easy for customers to avail offers and integrate into loyalty programs. Loyalty program software is most effective when they are responsive and fast, which translates into more signups and inductions for your restaurant.
Furthermore, Yollty and similar software focus on creating self-serving experiences, giving customers the power to engage with programs at their own pace, through apps they can download on their phones. These applications create personalized experiences for each customer and store their spending data and points in digital wallets for quick and easy access. Since they are so accessible, applications like Yollty are downloaded by thousands of people eager to apply to their favourite restaurant’s loyalty program.
For a business, investing in loyalty programs is relatively cheap and exponentially effective since it targets a precious portion of your customer base: the people who keep returning to your business. Giving them more incentive to return is a worthwhile investment into loyalty programs. This yields valuable word-of-mouth marketing that attracts new customers and incentivises more people to spend money in your business.
There seems to be no reason why loyalty programs shouldn’t be considered, especially when they yield brilliant ROI.
5. Customer Relationship Management platforms
The transition to a digital landscape opens up new possibilities to track and manage your customers’ data. Platforms like Yollty come with fully-featured CRM platforms that house all your customer data, in an easily accessible format so you can retrieve crucial data when needed.
CRM platforms allow you to identify top customers, filtered by visiting and spending frequency, referrals, and loyalty, so you can develop strategies to retain customers and improve your business’s long-term customer relationships and build a welcoming and involved brand identity.
CRM platforms usually come with built-in analytics programs that break down, contextualize and represent data in an actionable and valuable way. The ROI of achieving these milestones is priceless, since building and sustaining positive relationships with your customers leads to more business, customer retention and loyal customers, and is a long-term strategy for sustained success.
Customer relationship management platforms also allow restaurateurs insight into customer spending habits. Access to this data allows them to optimize and improve customer experiences by curating customer-specific experiences and personalizing them through food and drink recommendations, processing regular orders more efficiently, and better-informing marketing and sales pitching efforts. Since this data is centrally stored on the cloud, sales employees at different branches can access diverse customer data to inform local sales strategies.
Businesses of all sizes can benefit from CRM platforms since they feature important organizational, task automation and marketing functionalities that aid business strategies and customer acquisition attempts.
Conclusion
Businesses are steadily changing due to the digital transformation of their workflows and operations. Employers in various industries recognize the value of shifting toward digital programs and data management since automation speeds up and streamlines manual tasks like inventory management, feedback collection, and even accounting.
These workflows are further supplemented by robust data analytics that allows you to identify sales and customer habit trends to deliver actionable insights.
To achieve better ROI for your F&B business, implement software like Apicbase and Yollty in your business infrastructure. You can use it to take care of inventory management, customer data analytics, food performance analytics and menu development, which will return faster ROI than manual workflows.
The hospitality industry has always been fiercely competitive; business owners in this market should not miss out on any chance to improve their ROI.
