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Mobile POS takes restaurant concepts offsite

Tech savvy CEOs and executives consider mobile POS systems as mini Enterprise Resource Planning systems similar to systems that drive food and beverage manufacturing companies.

August 14, 2015 by Darrel Suderman — President CEO, Food Technical Consulting

Have you ever wondered how awesome it would be to monitor your restaurant operations performance on a real-time basis? That capability is currently available through new mobile POS (Point-of-Sale) systems. But the capabilities of mobile POS systems extend far beyond business reporting, although that represents the greatest value. Tech savvy CEOs and executives should consider mobile POS systems as mini ERP systems similar to ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems that drive food and beverage manufacturing companies.

Hand Held ERP System

I have consulted for leading Fortune 500 food and beverage companies over the past 10 years, helping them link their production performance reporting on a real-time basis to specific KPIs (or Key Performance Indicators).  I copyrighted the term “Real-Time Operations Performance Management, and 5 years ago SAP approved my new ERP business reporting system called “Real-Time Enterprise Performance Management System” enabled by their Business Objects platform. Another term sometimes used is Business Intelligence (BI) reporting, or Business Analytics (BA).

Fortunately, new mobile POS systems suppliers have invested a lot of capital in recent years to create highly functional mobile POS systems that enable greater value to be extracted from restaurant operating data.  One of the challenges of the restaurant industry over the past 10 years has been a large number of small IT companies with POS products that required proprietary programing or “code”. Most restaurant IT software suppliers failed to understand the critical operating processes, so an excessive amount of expensive programing was assigned to restaurant projects. As a result, the software installation ROI fell short of expectations. The restaurant industry lacked dominant restaurant-level software companies like SAP, Oracle, or INFOR.

Business Process Performance Reporting

The greatest value of new mobile POS systems is their business performance reporting capabilities – that should always be based on business KPIs. Some of the more dominant KPI areas are labor usage, and food costs based on received goods costs, sales performance, and waste. Of course food, labor, packaging, and category efficiencies must be factored in.

New Product Forecasting Performance Reporting

One of the most watched business performance area in restaurants is new sales promotions. Based on my experience working for 17 restaurant brands, forecasting accurate sales is challenging to say the least. But with some simple sales forecasting modeling, this complex business task can be greatly simplified so that real-time results can appear on the mobile POS system resting on the palm of your hand.

POS Performance Reporting at Multiple Management Levels

Another way to extract value from your mobile POS system is to set up tiered reporting based on multiple business levels like CEO-COO-CMO- CFO, Vice President Level, Director, and Manager levels. Since various management levels require different performance monitoring – so should be your reporting levels.

Dashboard Performance Reporting

Business reporting is often called “Dashboard Reporting” since reports that are highly visual are more user friendly. Reports can be color coded both for visual recognition of performance categories, and/or or pass/fail, or visualization of performance ranges.

In summary, take the new mobile POS systems for a spin around your restaurant to experience its expanded functionality. I hope that I have opened your appreciation for new mobile POS system’ capabilities, and to begin to enjoy IT systems as much as I do.