12 September 2024
How to use your digital menu to cover rising labour costs
Learn how to use digital menus to increase ATV and reach the full potential of every order, helping you cover those rising labour costs.
How to streamline your labour model with restaurant delivery integrations
Learn how managing your delivery orders in one place can reduce labour costs and help get more out of your team…
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Third-party restaurant delivery channels like Deliveroo and Just Eat are essential to running a modern hospitality business.
But for each of these channels you add to your operation, it can feel like you’re adding another layer of complexity.
This can be a real problem for your labour model when your team are wasting time managing all these separate channels. And this can have a knock-on effect for the customer service you’re delivering at your sites.
So, how can you make third-party delivery work more efficiently for your operation?
Read on to discover how growing brands have centralised order management to solve the delivery problem, making their labour model more efficient as they do so…
What problems do third-party delivery channels cause?
When introduced as isolated channels, third-party delivery partners can disrupt the smooth running of your operation.
1. Labour inefficiency:
Some operations dedicate a full-time staff member to managing incoming orders from third-party delivery channels. This staff member is often tasked with manually inputting orders from delivery channels into the POS so that those orders can exist in the same kitchen system.
Not only is this a waste of time for a staff member, but it’s also a process rife with human error. Manually inputting orders can easily lead to a missed item or incorrect customisation, ultimately resulting in a bad customer experience and higher waste costs.
When people are answering the telephones and processing the delivery orders and the Just Eat orders it produces a lot of stress. Taking that entire part out of the equation and allowing 95% of staff to concentrate on guaranteeing quality within the kitchen was a massive part of what’s got us to where we’re at today
Optimising Labour: join the webinar
26/09/24 | 15:00-15:45 BST
Discover how ambitious brands are overcoming limited labour resources and building strong teams.
Learn live from trailblazers including Tommy Giraux from Honest Burgers and David Ellison from Deep Blue Restaurants.
2. Kitchen chaos
But if you don’t dedicate a team member to inputting delivery orders into the POS, your kitchen will pay the price.
When each of your order channels comes through to separate Kitchen Display Screens and tablets, it’s next to impossible for your team to manage them efficiently. How can they know which orders came in first or which ones to focus on next?
This is known as ‘tablet hell’ and causes a stressed-out, inefficient kitchen team that struggles to deliver orders accurately, quickly, or calmly.
3. Wasted admin time
For each delivery channel you add, there’s at least one more menu to manage, on one more separate system.
This can be a real headache for your head office team. When you depend on multiple separate platforms hosting your delivery channels, even updating the price of a single menu item can become a real labour.
This doesn’t just waste valuable time; it’s another part of the process where human error can have a real impact on the customer experience.
We used to work through the night to make menu updates because there was no way to update everything in a simple way during trading hours. We were using three separate, fragmented systems to do what we can do now with just one platform
What is centralised order management?
The answer to these problems? Centralised order management.
With a single Order Management System, all of your order channels and menus are managed in one central place. That includes your on-site channels like POS and Kiosks, as well as off-site channels like Click & Collect.
Critically, all your third-party delivery channels are also managed in this single system.
The benefits of centralised delivery integrations
Free staff from manual order inputs
When your operation uses one system to manage all orders, they all come through into the same platform. This includes any orders from delivery partners like Deliveroo and Just Eat. They all exist in the same ecosystem automatically.
This eliminates the need for a staff member to manually input orders from delivery partners into the POS and negates the potential for human error and order inaccuracy.
This can save your operation on labour costs, or you can dedicate that member of staff to more valuable hospitality tasks across your operation.
When I was looking for a tech solution, it was paramount that delivery orders needed to feed into our POS so we didn’t have a separate system. It needed to be all singing, all dancing, all channels under one roof. And our partner of choice was Vita Mojo
Run a calmer kitchen without tablet hell
A centralised Kitchen Management System is an essential part of an Order Management System. This KMS handles all orders, meaning your kitchen doesn’t have to work from multiple systems with separate tablets showing separate orders.
Instead, your Kitchen Display Screens automatically shows orders from every channel – or you can filter the channels you want to see on each screen.
This means your kitchen will be working from a single source of truth. They can clearly see orders in the sequence they come in, and they can fulfil orders more calmly, accurately, and quickly. With a more efficient and streamlined kitchen process, you can save on labour costs and still fulfil your orders.
Save time on menu management
And for your head office team, delivery channels no longer have to add hours of manual menu management to their time.
Instead, menus from every channel – including third-party delivery – are all managed in one place. To change the price of a menu item, for example, you don’t have to make the same change multiple times across platforms. Change it once, and push that change out to all your channels – including delivery partners – with the push of a button.
This means hours less repetitive, manual work, freeing your team up to dedicate to more growth-oriented tasks.
In the old world, we’d have to update the in-store menu, online menu, Uber Eats menu, everything had to be done separately. Now everything’s available in one platform to update everything. That’s been a huge time-saver in terms of efficiency for me and the team at head office.
The long-term benefit of delivery integrations
Using one system to combine your delivery and in-house orders is a critical part of hospitality growth strategy and this goes beyond saving on labour costs. The above benefits will all contribute to long-term growth plans.
- Your newly streamlined kitchen will be equipped to fulfil an increased amount of orders perfectly every time.
- Your team can improve the customer experience and deliver the human touch instead of spending the shift inputting delivery orders.
- Head office can spend more time on growth strategy and data, and less time manually changing multiple menus.
Want more advice on your labour model?
Talk to one of our experts about your operation’s labour challenges, and discover how you can save on costs and get the most out of your team with a single system.
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