From idea to decision: crisis management for restaurants

Whatever the situation may be, never lose your poise. How you handle a crisis can determine the future of your establishment. Crisis management in the restaurant or café requires a constant monitoring of orders processing, money flows and products movements in the warehouse.

To make a sound decision, you will need reliable and complete information. How to get it at the right moment?

A good response to a good idea

So, you wake up in the morning and you’ve got an urgent idea. Isn’t that a familiar situation for the manager?

Yesterday you felt that something was wrong and you could hardly fall asleep thinking about how to solve the problem quickly and efficiently. You come back to it with a fresh mind.

A top-notch idea is to be caught on the fly, especially in today’s fast growing and expanding world of technologies and information. It must be levelheaded and professional to handle the problem in a positive manner.

What kind of figures could be within easy reach? On the screen of the smartphone that you are scrolling up and down while having your morning cup of coffee. It might be revenue from yesterday, products movement in the warehouse, schedules and staff’s achievements, sales slowdown and peak –  all of these are just in one application, which provides data 24/7.

Responsiveness is almost a human quality of the digital interface. There is no need to call your book-keeper who is under her morning rush of getting children off to school or nursery school on time. You don’t have to rush to the office to sit down at your PC. Instead you are clicking on the appropriate report and it is displayed on the screen within a couple of seconds.

Where does it come from?

Mobile systems for café or restaurant management are the network of devices which exchange data via the cloud-based server. It looks like this:

1. The waiter is taking the client’s order by using the mobile terminal – it may be a tablet or a special device called a POS-terminal.
2. All information about the order appears immediately on the kitchen tablet or on the kitchen check printed by the POS-printer.
3. The cook is preparing dishes; the bartender is making drinks. Once the order is ready, the waiter will receive a signal.
4. The guest is paying the bill and receiving a guest check.
5. Information about revenues, applied discounts and bonuses and sold products is continuously transferred to the administration panel on the manager’s laptop, tablet or smartphone.

While opening the admin panel, you may learn how much you have earned for the last day or for the last month and what has affected the income amount. It takes just a few minutes of analysis and you’ve got a solid basis for the decision making.

What else can be found in the admin panel?

All data about café or restaurant activities are updated automatically in real time. You can benefit from opportunities to monitor:

• Orders– taken, completed, in process
• Cash flows in the cash register
• Products stock, recommendations as to the stock replenishment
• Reports about work of each employee, establishment or outlets chain
• Any changes in sales depending on the time of day, the day of the week, the season and so on.

Besides, this program makes restaurant bookkeeping and HR management simpler and more efficient:

• It tracks amounts and dates of fiscal charges, expenses and income by each establishment and even the whole chain.
• It helps to make and edit shift schedules, to keep records of working hours.
• It allows calculating rewards for each employee based on the specified criteria and on the results of work.

There is no limit to the simplicity

Sometimes you need just a few values – cash register data throughout the day, payments methods, and sales by hours or by certain dates. You don’t even have to open the admin panel. Being in the train or on the bus stop, you are pulling out your smartphone and you are opening the mobile application You don’t miss out on your precious moment as you can write down your idea and develop a further strategy for your business.