It is a difficult thing to operate a single restaurant. Operating multiple outlets with their own employees, its own charm and its own clientele, attempting to keep the same brand identity and same operational quality level across all of them is a whole new level of tasking. Tableside ordering, properly implemented in more than one site, can in fact simplify this instead of complicating it but only when the system is previously designed with multi-location management in mind.

This is the recipe to deploy and operate a tableside ordering in a number of restaurants with a range of locales without sacrificing the consistency that makes a brand familiar or the flexibility that allows most locales to react to the local environment.

Centralize What Should Be Centralized

The first principle of multi-location management is the ability to assume that certain things can be better centrally controlled and others be centrally flexible. Brand identity, core menu and general pricing strategy tend to be under the central management. Local specials, slight menu changes in response to local taste patterns, and certain day to day operational choices such as staffing are what we leave with the local team.

An excellent tableside ordering software must allow you to do this division in a clear manner. Pricing and changes on core menu items and brand-wide can be changed at a central dashboard and distributed to all locations at once. Location-specific products or location-based promotions must be a local thing that can be edited by local employees without requiring a central-level promotion process to approve every minor change.

Set Up Consistent Branding Across Every Location

Visitors to a chain store of the same restaurant brand would have a similar experience, and the digital menu is no less a part of that than is the physical space and the food itself. A digital menu which appears significantly different at this place than it appears at another generates a fragmented brand perception, in spite of the consistent quality of foods.

Create a definite model of menu design such as the style of photos, the tone of description and visual designing which is replicated in all the locations. The majority of multi-location management platforms enable a central template to be copied and modified to suit local items, instead of each location creating their digital menu anew.

Standardize Staff Training Across Locations

As much as the guest-facing menu is supposed to be consistent, employees training on the operational aspect of the ordering system ought to receive similar standardized training across all the locations. This helps avoid a scenario in which the staff in one location is working on the system and are very comfortable with it whereas the other location staff are making it up on the fly since they were not given the necessary training to work with the system.

Come up with one training tool, be it a written document, a video tour, or both, all new employees in all locations go through when onboarding. This uniformity is especially important with multi-location operations when employees occasionally switch locations or when regional managers have multiple locations and would want to be sure that all locations are adhering to the same standards.

Use Centralized Analytics to Compare Performance

The real benefit of having running tableside ordering in more than one location under one platform is that, unlike had each location been operating an entirely different, independent system, it becomes much easier to compare performance data between the sites.

It can be beneficial to examine the volume of orders, average check size, and menu items across locations to see some patterns. A dish that works remarkably well in a particular place and falls short in another could signify a real taste difference in the region that can be served, or it may point to an operational problem, e.g. poor preparation quality in one of the lower performing locations.

This type of cross-location assessment is among the most useful ones that multi-location operators may have to determine opportunities as well as issues that otherwise would not have been noticed should data of any of its locations reside in its own siloed server.

Allow Local Flexibility Where It Genuinely Matters

Consistency is important in terms of brand name but strict centralized control of every minute detail usually backfire against the multi-location restaurants; especially chains of multi-location, in different regions or cities that have authentic varied customer tastes.

By offering local managers a place to add a location-specific special, to scale sizes of portions based on local preferences, or temporarily adding a seasonal local ingredient, the individual locations have space to react to their real customer base without compromising the attach to the larger brand consistency that the core of the menus and the overall ordering experience extends.

It is all about making a plain line on what local managers can decide on their own or what goes to the central authorities which must be made clear so that there is no form of ambiguity or frustration as to where the line falls.

Building This With Menu Tiger

For multi-location restaurant groups looking to implement this kind of centralized-yet-flexible tableside ordering structure, Restaurant Order Management System with Digital QR Code from Menu Tiger provides the underlying infrastructure that supports both centralized menu management and location-level flexibility.

Centrally managed aspects of core menu, price, and branding can be delivered to all of your locations, which can then be distributed uniformly, making all locations appear to the guest as the same level of digital experience, regardless of whether they are at your flagship store or a recently opened one elsewhere in town. Meanwhile, separate locations can still call things locally out of stock, offer location-specific specials, and update on their own in real-time without having everything that even small changes in a busy service go through central approval.

The analytics the platform offers work at the entire multi-location scope, and allows the owners and regional managers to have a single picture of how all the locations are performing, what dishes are performing well or better in one location and not elsewhere, and where focus may be necessary without having to run individual systems or pieces of data that cut across locations.

Rolling Out to New Locations Efficiently

With a multi-location restaurant group, the ability to have a set established, centrally operated tableside ordering template would greatly accelerate the process of setting up a new location. Instead of creating a digital menu and order system every time a store is launched, the main menu and branding template can be duplicated, and the changes requiring location-specific work can be created anew.

This cost-effectiveness is significant to emerging restaurant chains, in which the operational overhead of establishing a new place is large, and the operations management overhead is already high. One of the major points of friction in the expansion process goes away through the provision of a tableside ordering system that can be expanded in a smooth manner as it is new site-independent using a ground-up manual rebuild, unlike a full rebuild.

Keeping Communication Open Between Locations and Central Management

In addition to the technology, effective management of order taking at various branches requires the establishment of proper channels of communication between managers at different geographies and the centralized managers. A clear means of migrating local managers to report problems they are having with their system, propose menu changes in accordance with what they are observing with their own customer base and report on any comments on the ordering experience given by the guest that may point to a larger trend that needs to be solved.

A rollout of a multi-location tableside ordering that considers each location as unique, and there is no local input channel, would likely lack the important on-the-ground understanding that would benefit the system across the board. The most effective multi-location operations creates a feedback mechanism in that the central management establishes the framework and standards, and the local groups provide the texture and changes that ensure that, in each location, the team is truly in touch with the local customer.