Save your costs of manual order management

One of the key drivers of restaurant digitization is the reduction of the dull and repetitive work done by staff every day. Manual order management is the best example of it and apart from being dull, repetitive, and frustrating, it is also surprisingly expensive. Check out why!

According to the 7Shifts report, up to 43% of restaurants expect the overall costs of running the restaurant to rise. The labor costs are pointed to as one of the main drivers of the rise, with 52% of restaurant owners saying that labor costs will have a negative impact on their businesses.

The Fitch ratings data indicate that after the pandemic (or at least at the moment when the threat is away) restaurant owners are trying to lure back the employees laid off during the first wave. The main tool to do so is to raise the wage – and it contributes to the overall cost rising.

Simply to say: the cost of every employee minute is rising. Thus, manual order management, a thing to overlook before the pandemic, has become a significant threat not only to the staff morale but also to the company’s financial performance.

What is a manual order management

The manual order management is exactly what it seems to be. It is the situation when all the work around the food order processing, including the collection, transferring the order to the kitchen, and sending it to the customer, is done with little to no automation.

The situation is bearable when it is about managing the order flow in a single restaurant without digital channels. The challenge starts when there are other channels involved, including the integrator platforms like Uber Eats, owned digital channels, phone orders, and on-site selling.

Again, the bigger the scale, the greater the challenge. But apart from being hard to manage, the manual model comes also with an unexpected cost – much higher than one would expect.

Let’s calculate the cost of the manual order management

The costs of manual order management

To calculate the costs, one needs to make an assumption. The first is about what has to be done. It is about two additional minutes of work for every order – to collect it, transfer to the kitchen, collect the meal and pass it further – to the courier or customer.

Due to the US Department of Labour the minimum wage of a waiter, including tips, stands at $7.25 per hour. That makes roughly 12 cents per every minute. Thus, every order makes up to 24 cents of cost.

And now – how many orders are there in a fast food restaurant? How many of them are flowing through integrator services?

The average company that uses Ordering Stack processes 27 orders per hour in a single localization. With an average of 14 working hours. That amounts roughly to $90. And this is a cost for only one sample restaurant for one day. If there are more restaurants, the cost multiplies. And with the new working day, the process starts over again.

Also, there are countless things one could do instead of manual transferring the orders from the integrator tablet to the kitchen or back again – for example, to serve meals, clean up the interior or have short rest. Having a less stressed employee is also a benefit for the company.

Finally, this cost is totally avoidable with automating software like Ordering Stack.

Automating order management and collection

A sophisticated digital restaurant system like Ordering Stack can fully automate this process by combining the orders from every source in one place. This is done by merging the systems via API and tossing obsolete devices. This comes with multiple advantages:

• Reducing human error – when the human is out of the process, the risk of a simple human error is significantly reduced. The interconnected machine will never lose an order or make mistake in it.
• Reducing the time – the orders are processed and passed by in real-time with no delay. Thus, the bigger the restaurant or chain, the greater the savings are.
• Scalability – if the order management is done in an automated way, it doesn’t matter if there are seven, seventy or seven hundred orders a day – the system is equally effective tireless and efficient.
• Flexibility – once implemented, the system serves as a backbone to bring new services and support existing operations. Thus, if there is a new channel to add, be that a chatbot or a social selling platform, it is equally easy to add it to the system.

All the benefits enlisted above would have been seen as drawbacks without the automated ordering system. The company would need even more time to process the orders and the employee would be even busier with this dull and tedious work. There will be no scalability and flexibility due to that, and human errors would skyrocket.

That’s why the order processing automation system like Ordering Stack has become a must-have tool of a modern, post-COVID restaurant.

Summary

Manual order management is a reasonable and intuitive choice – as long as there is no more than one restaurant and three channels. If the owner wants to scale up the business, the competition is putting pressure and the market is evolving, the management system becomes a must for any restaurant.

If you wish to get more information about how Ordering Stack can support your business and how to reduce the dull and manual work in the HoReCa company, don’t hesitate to contact us now!