Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book
“Talking of farms, in nearby Dade City—which is famous for another citrus variety called the tart kumquat—Curtis Beebe runs a restaurant called Pearl in the Grove. He could easily position it within the “farm to table” genre, but he prefers the humbler “home cooking” moniker. The rave reviews inform us that it does not matter how you classify it.”
“Beebe discussed a number of technologies that are transforming his labor-intensive industry. He also pointed out that one size does not fi t all across his three establishments: “The single technolog y that has had the most impact on the business is social media. We wouldn’t have even been able to launch the fi rst restaurant without social media. I don’t think there would have been any other way to reach our potential customers without it. Print wouldn’t work. Broadcast media would have been too expensive for us. In terms of customer-facing business apps, the most useful one is OpenTable. There are two components to that—the reservation management component and, more importantly for us, the marketing component. “
“We use the NCR Aloha point-of-sale system at the gastropub. That includes wireless, handheld devices and wireless printers. They format customer orders and print them in the kitchen, and provide us visibility on what we’re selling, typical ticket turn times, and other data. Aloha also has an app called Pulse. I can look on my phone and tell you how many hamburgers we’ve sold, how many returns we’ve had that may have been due to quality or just misordering, who’s clocked in, who isn’t, what our labor-to-revenue ratio is. That allows me to run the place without being there as much. It’s a management-labor-saving device.”
“For menu management, on the other hand, we use SinglePlatform. That allows us to format the menu electroni- cally and distribute it to multiple sites. We just send it to them in either a PDF or a Word document and they convert it. They have a plug-in for our websites. Those menus also get picked up by many of the social media and review sites. If you go to TripAdvisor and say ‘view menu,’ it’s actually using the SinglePlatform plug-in to display the menu.”
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