No Software Needed for Your Restaurant

Are you tired of spending more time trying to schedule a meeting with your Managers and Directors of Operations than you actually spend in the meeting? Does it exhaust you to collaborate on group projects via e-mail, fax or phone? Are you one of the many restaurant owners that would love to have your entire organization on a network, but can't afford the thousands of dollars to purchase, install and maintain the network and server? Not to mention the office space that would be required to store the server. Plus, in most cases, unless you have the extra time and technical knowledge, you have to hire additional IT personnel just to run the thing.

We have often wondered how the speed of light foodservice professional is handling his business affairs these days. The answer came in products like HyperOffice which is perfect for organizations that have multiple locations and various staff working on the same project, multiple projects, or just need to stay in contact with one another. The best part is that if you can use e-mail or fire off a browser, you can use this service.

As an online software tool that allows management teams that have to deal with multiple locations and a mobile distributed workforce to organize and manage the critical data needed to run your business. It gives small and medium sized businesses access to a level of technology that up until now has been only available to very large organizations who have the wherewithal and the IT structure to put in this type of collaborative environment.

Francis Namin, President and Owner of Centro Italian Grill, Red Tomato and a chain of chicken rotisserie restaurants said "To better serve our customers and to keep our operations nimble, it is crucial that our geographically dispersed employees have easy access to business-critical information from anywhere and anytime. HyperOffice gives us a single point of access for all corporate documents, along with online document storage, document management, shared calendaring, shared project management, and business class email. I do not have to worry about data loss or equipment failure and best of all we do not have any servers or software to install or maintain."

According to Farzin Arsanjani, President & Co-founder of HyperOffice, "It's a collaborative tool, it has many different names, some people call it an intranet, some call it a groupware, and some even call it an online workplace. Basically it lets different members of the same team communicate and work together online just with an Internet connection. So, for example, if you have multiple restaurant locations and you have employees spread about any geographical area and you want to just set up a meeting using HyperOffice, you can have access to everyone's schedule online and you can look at when people are available and create a meeting within just a few seconds with any internet connection."

Farzin makes a great point, what is your alternative? The alternative is to make phone calls or email to several people and try to coordinate schedules. Which nobody likes to do because it is so time-consuming and often trying to do something as simple as schedule a meeting with several different individuals in different locations is sometimes an impossible task. Therefore shared calendaring is an ideal aspect of the application for management personnel.

Another important aspect is sharing documents. Employees and partners can have shared documents in one central place. The beauty of that is the documents reside on HyperOffice servers so that small businesses don't have to be burdened with data integrity, data loss, backup or virus attacks and so forth. Data and documents are always available and accessible to your people. The system will let teams of people collaborate on documents.

For example, if a group of people are working on a menu and or price changes, they need to collaborate on it. By using HyperOffice, they can all access the document and they can have file locking and overwrite protection with commenting turned on within the document so that the next person can make comments without having to change the document. So instead of changing the content, they are just leaving the comments for the next person to see and for the administrator to physically go in and make the changes. You can also have multiple versions of the document live online so that you can always refer to older versions of an existing document. Whether you are working on a menu or a marketing campaign, whatever the task may be, you can collaborate with the document management. The shared tasks allow managers and executive owners to assign projects to their people right online. From any browser wherever they are, the assigned person can access their assignment.

Most restaurants are limited to the amount of office space you have, so services like HyperOffice are perfect because you can use it anywhere you are or even from any place with access to the Internet. There is no need to fill up your office with computer servers and software boxes and things like that. All you need is a broadband or even dial up connection and that is it.

Farzin stated, "The restaurant owner can pay per user per month so there is no commitment, they pay for what they use, they can scale up or down, there is no long term commitment with it. The average cost per user is $6 per month per user and they get plenty of disc space with that plus free online training and customer support via e-mail or phone."

At the end of the day, it adds an element of agility to any operation so that the operation becomes more flexible and responsive to people's requirements. So that if you're the owner of a business and you have to be on a road trip and you need to respond to a key supplier or have an opening of a new restaurant, you can always have access to your team members and corporate data from wherever you are.

"We can tie in third party applications right into HyperOffice so that if you use an online ordering of food or supplies, you can set that right up through HyperOffice so that there's no need to leave HyperOffice and go to a third party application." Farzin said, "with the single sign-on functionality, you don't have to remember multiple passwords or usernames. It's also very customizable. Large organizations can decide how the service looks and feels for their employees. You can go online and see every feature and how it works. Plus with the high turnover rate in restaurants, managers don't have to worry about employees walking off with computers, hard drives, files or information. Therefore there is no data loss."

Services like Hyperoffice can also both replace Outlook and Co-exist with Outlook, it replaces Outlook in that these services are an e-mail client so you can use any browser whether you have a Mac or a PC and compose e-mail or manage e-mail with any other e-mail application. These services support POP 3 so you can have many different e-mail addresses within them along with auto-forwarding and auto-reply. Best of all these services are easy to learn and claim to have superior tech support.

According to Chaim Lowenstein, COO & CTO of Web Commerce, "HyperOffice is a perfect solution for small to medium sized businesses. Even though IT is our specialty, we recommend HyperOffice for such businesses with multiple locations because it is cost effective, easy to use and is a great organizational tool." Since 1981 Web Commerce, has custom built and installed computers, servers, notebooks and whatever else their customers desire in this computer based world. They know what it takes to set up and run a network and the ease and power of these services give todays restaurant operator more power than ever.