It hasn’t always been that way. Mr. Chao remembers a time when he would have to travel to each restaurant individually and pilfer through binders of printed Excel sheets if he wanted to examine the back-office records of his locations. At that point, the operations at Mr. Chao’s restaurants relied on old software and that made management of multiple restaurants tricky. The backbone was a DOS-based software that held data on individual restaurants on independent systems, which could not be accessed without traveling to each location.

Meanwhile McDonald’s Canada was encouraging its successful owner/owner operators to expand their franchise business by opening even more locations. Mr. Chao was almost ready, but there was one thing he knew he would need to make this next step in his business a reality—a back office software solution that would allow him to analyze the data his restaurants from one location. 

He investigated the best options and not long after implemented Clearview’s Human Resource Information System under a corporate initiative, which allowed restaurants to move from reporting their labor statistics on paper to the computer. This enabled them to digitally manage employee’s timecards and hours and integrate the payroll system—and make better decisions by analyzing the collective data. Mr. Chao saw two quick benefits: Labor control improvements and the ability to more accurately manage employee information. That meant cost savings and other benefits such as employee satisfaction growth. 

Similar to our recent success story with a Dairy Queen franchisee, Mr. Chao found success in analyzing the data collected with the solution. Danny Shulman, who now serves as Manager of Application Development at McDonald’s in Canada, would go on to other franchisees like Mr. Chao as they modernized back office operations. Working with owner/operators as they implemented Clearview for their own restaurants helped Mr. Shulman develop a model for McDonald’s Canada corporate locations to implement Clearview at their own restaurants. “With those types of activities, having a back office application that provides data from anywhere at any time is obviously useful,” Mr. Shulman said.

To learn more how McDonald’s Canada took Bill Chao’s success and implemented Clearview, read our case study.

Nowadays there are also sorts of applications delivering data—from point of sales systems to online platforms to self-service kiosks. Like Mr. Chao, savvy managers and franchisees in the restaurant industry are using this insight, culled from hundreds if not thousands of sources, to make smart decisions. They’re turning to end-to-end connected restaurant solutions to move people through lines faster (or eliminate lines altogether), get the right menu items and messages in front of customers at the right time, automate kitchen processes to better use staff, and improve operations in countless ways—in large part thanks to rich data. 

Much like Mr. Chao, technology leaders in food service, hospitality & retail increasingly rely on disruptive technologies to accelerate their businesses. They’re investing to improve things like personalization and communication, and see a time when artificial intelligence will play a critical role in their business. These industries and others are adopting 10 leading disruptive technologies expected to generate trillions in economic value in the decade ahead. Panasonic is deeply engaged in these technologies. We believe that connecting them into integrated solutions is essential to creating entirely new experiences. To understand the role they play in other organizations, Panasonic Corporation of North America commissioned a new research series, Moving Forward, on how disruptive technologies are impacting businesses, government agencies and entire industries.

Food service, hospitality & retail firms are especially bullish on artificial intelligence (AI), which can help them better understand the needs and behavior of their customers. Learn more about how tech leaders see disruptive technologies impacting restaurants and other businesses in Moving Forward. 
 

Not all restaurant innovations come in the form of new flavors or food items. Some important breakthroughs arise as solutions to common problems plaguing restauranteurs—from high labor costs to declining traffic. How to use breakthroughs such as big data and other disruptive technologies dominated our conversations at the 2018 National Restaurant Association trade show. 

In a recent research study conducted by Panasonic, nearly four out of five respondents stated they believed competitors in their own industry will pull ahead if they do not adopt or invest in disruptive technology. Seven in ten said they felt companies outside their industry could disrupt them. 

And these ideas were more pronounced in the food service, hospitality and retail industries. These sectors are more likely than others to say disruptive technologies are critical to the future success of their companies.

Across all industries, three of the top five adopted disruptive technologies are cloud, IoT and robotics. Each of these technologies plays a role in the connected kitchen, where appliances all sync to the cloud, communicate over a network, can be managed remotely and even using predictive analytics. Spyce, a new restaurant in Boston, is built around a robotic kitchen, and relies on cloud and IoT. The robotic kitchen “wirelessly collects multiple orders from a bank of self-service menu kiosks, displays the names of the guests whose orders are being prepared, pipes the various ingredients from refrigerated hoppers into a wok to be cooked and tossed, and dumps the hot meal into a compostable bowl waiting on the counter below,” according to a review in Salon. 

Labor is one of the costliest elements of running a restaurant and can eat up as much as 40 percent of a restaurant’s gross revenue, according to estimates. Software that has the capacity to collect and analyze data will the connecting element of automated processes and are already making it possible for labor intensive industries across the board to run more efficiently. MaryPat Sullivan, chief nursing officer at Overlook Medical Center in Summit, New Jersey, told Healthcare IT News earlier this year that the hospital network was able to save $70 million on operational costs by successfully employing predictive analytics. Software programs such as Panasonic’s Clearview platform have helped franchise owners of some of the largest QSR chains grow at a faster rate than their corporate-owned counterparts that still operate on legacy software. These functionalities integrated with the automation capabilities of PanaCIM are already changing the landscape of kitchen and back office interoperability.

Last month, we wrote about how the hospitality and retail industry are turning to artificial intelligence to create an increasingly nuanced personal experience for their customers. Of all the industries polled in our research, 90 percent say personalization is important to the future success of their company. Furthermore, they believe that the first step is to simplify the customer experience. But there is also a divide about what personalizing the customer experience entails. According to 40 percent of respondents, “personalizing” means making it simpler for customers to engage. Only 20 percent interpret this as “being able to customize services and offerings” by using customer data analytics to predict and impact purchase behavior. 

Personalization in ordering has contributed to the widespread interest and adoption of kiosks in the restaurant industry. McDonalds see kiosks as part its digital growth accelerator that will expand choices for how customers order, pay and are served, according to its latest annual report. Similarly, Subway also announced it was planning to introduce kiosks. In Texas, a number of Dairy Queen restaurants are already reaping benefits of self-service kiosks. 

Brands that have been early adopters of kiosks have reported that the average check size is up to 30 percent higher than at the counter. These kiosks don’t just allow the restaurant to continually upsell through the entire ordering process, but customers are also given the opportunity to fully customize their order, which leads to an increasingly personalized experience.