At PayrollHero, we are always pushing for a tech enabled world for our clients. There are plenty of good things that come out of automating processes in your restaurant or retail business.
To name a few: it’s more efficient and saves time, which means there is a higher turnover of customers; there is less room for error; business owners spend less on manpower so overall costs go down.
All around the world we see a preference towards adopting technology. On one hand, it is because minimum wages are expected to rise (like in the US) while on the other hand, a shortage of labour supply is forcing business owners to adopt technology (like in Japan or Singapore).
All in all, the shift towards automation is inevitable. We thought it would be helpful to give you some tips on how to stay ahead of the curve.
Apps, apps, apps
We can’t stress on this enough. There is an app for everything today. Here is a non-exhaustive list on everything that you can safely outsource to an app:
- Point of Sale Systems: Square is the most famous POS system. It works worldwide, which makes it easier for you to monitor sales if you run businesses in multiple countries
- Loyalty apps: We’ve talked about Perx before. Loyalty apps help in bringing in more customers and increase foot traffic in your store.
- Reservations: Chope is the rockstar of reservations in Southeast Asia. The Asian version of OpenTable runs in Hong Kong, Singapore and other countries in the regions, making it the perfect vendor for booking reservations in your restaurant.
- Inventory Management: Another Southeast Asian favourite, Trade Gecko is your go-to app for managing inventory. With a clean and user-friendly interface, it takes very little for a business owner to realize that inventory management is a nightmare that is solved deftly by Trade Gecko.
- Food Delivery: FoodPanda takes care of delivering food to your customers, while Slurp is another POS system that helps customers order food remotely. Slurp helps you take orders but doesn’t deliver food itself.
We have a whole other blogpost devoted towards these apps. You can check it out here.
Revamping the menu
Laminated menu cards are a thing of the past. Restaurants like Fish and Co. use tablets for their menus. With a few taps, your customer’s order goes straight to the kitchen. Tablet menus prevent errors in ordering. It is also much easier to change menus on a tablet than to print new menus each time you want to add a dish or change prices.
Feedback systems
Does that little device look familiar to you? You have probably seen that at airports all over the world. For a feedback system, this one is pretty elementary but it does the trick. One look at it, and your immediate response would be to click on the button that reflects what you feel. It’s an instantaneous feedback loop that can be used by almost any business.
Food bloggers
This one is more of a marketing idea. While it is not really about automating your restaurant, it is about using technology to get your business out there. Tourist destinations, like Singapore, are big on food blogs for suggestions to restaurants.
Some of the famous bloggers have a huge following on Facebook and Instagram. The idea is to get these food bloggers to write a review on your restaurant and let social media take care of the rest. Of course, you need to be confident about getting a solid review!
We hope these ideas encourage you to embrace technology. There is no downside to adopting tech while the upside will result in cost minimization and big returns for your business. Let us know if you have any more suggestions!
Singapore is a fairly saturated market when it comes to the restaurant industry. With high turnover of employees and ever increasing rates for rental space, there are a lot of things that restaurant owners need to worry about. We think that getting your restaurant’s name out to the masses should not be one of them. We’ve got you some easy tips to throw your restaurant into the limelight in Singapore.
Singapore’s Changi Airport is building its fourth terminal which is scheduled to open in 2017. Terminal 4, now 70% complete, will see 16 million passengers through the year. That’s an estimated total of 82 million passengers once T4 operates in full swing. We are super excited to see what Changi has in store for us, considering Terminals 1-3 have movie theaters, a butterfly garden, 
Coffee brands ~ Really happy that I got to see some coffee brands present at MAFBEX! And guess what? They’re all franchise-ready! I had a trip to Bangkok recently and there were coffee kiosks in almost every street that I went to. Amazing! That would be a perfect dream.
Baking supplies ~ There were several booths selling cake decorating tools, packaging materials, stencils, etc. But, I just had to take a photo of the materials below because they were really huge.
Creative destruction
2. What are you top 5 favourite restaurants and why?