Restaurants jumping the food delivery bandwagon are starting to use POS software in a new way — as dashboards and delivery companions to dispatch tasks, manage orders, and dispatch deliveries in one place.
Thanks to a wide variety of new order management apps and POS integrations, restaurant owners and managers can integrate incoming orders from partners like DoorDash, GrubHub, and Uber Eats with their point of sale (POS) applications, offering a host of advantages, including granting control of how orders hit the kitchen, removing the need to re-key orders, and better management of dispatch and delivery.
Leveraging Food Delivery Technology
These apps can leverage this new technology to manage their own in-house operations to ensure efficiency and high-quality customer service.
That’s important because delivery makes up a substantial amount of restaurant sales. According to data of the NPD Group, revenue from restaurant deliveries has increased fivefold in the past five years, totaling $16.5 billion in mid-2017. The total number of deliveries has increased by 10 percent. As a result, a lot of restaurants are redesigning operations and even remodeling to accommodate the surge.
Tablets are a great fit for restaurant operations even though food delivery apps can run on a variety of devices. It’s not cost-effective to repurpose a POS device that you can use to process on-site orders and transactions just for delivery business. On the other hand, most laptops are too delicate, too expensive, or just inconvenient for other restaurant management applications to be used only for delivery.
Enter Tablets
Your staff will find the tablet form allows them to see all food delivery-related data on one screen. This way, they can access more info via the familiar touch interface easily. Dashboards enable users to see delivery locations and interact with incoming orders, see driver locations, use route mapping and KPIs, and all this on a single touchscreen.
Some tablets feature a rugged design, which is perfect for heavy-duty premises like kitchens, backroom offices or busy counters. These devices resist dust, heat, humidity, and other conditions that put wear and tear on restaurant equipment.
A durable tablet is the perfect tool for a driver. At the restaurant, your driver can get a tablet with an integrated barcode scanner and scan the barcode label on orders on location and again at the delivery address, thereby making sure the right food gets to the right person.
Delivery Speed Optimization
Mounted on the car’s dash, the tablet can display an easy-to-see rundown of upcoming orders, GPS-enabled route mapping, and special delivery instructions from the customer, which will improve speed and service levels. Data of McKinsey show the speed of delivery is the biggest factor in customer satisfaction. Almost two-thirds of consumers across markets cite it as a key factor.
Once he has arrived at the delivery location, the driver can grab the tablet to collect payment and tips on the spot. Even if your delivery person is on a motorcycle or working in severe weather conditions, a rugged tablet is still completely usable with gloves. What is more, the client will appreciate an easy to read display.
Through every step, a sturdy design protects the tablet from drops, vibration, and other rigors of the road.
Best Systems
As far as POS systems go, TouchBistro comes widely recommended. It is designed specifically for restaurants of all types – café, pub, fine dining, you name it. It offers mobility, cloud-based reporting, great customer support and many other benefits.
As an iPad POS system, it won’t leave you stuck at the checkout. Your waiters can take your POS anywhere in your restaurant and take orders and accept payments. This helps your restaurant run efficiently. The cloud-based reporting lets you access back-office features using any device that has a browser. This can be done remotely. You can follow what’s going on at the restaurant without having to be there physically. This is a major advantage when you’re involved in deliveries.
This system’s solid reporting tools offer excellent assistance in managing and growing your business. With sales data, inventory counts, expense reports and other analytical data, the system features detailed and comprehensive views of how your business is doing, which dishes or drinks are selling the most, who your top staff are and more. It can also help you establish trends to improve your menu.
Another widely recommended system is MobileBytes. Its cloud POS allows you to manage your restaurant’s delivery operations with ease thanks to the Delivery Dispatch system. Delivery Dispatch makes it simple to assign your drivers delivery orders and provide them with turn-by-turn directions right from your point of sale terminal.
If your establishment experiences a high volume of delivery orders, you might appreciate MobileBytes POS. Below is an overview of its features:
- Quickly add or remove drivers
- Turn-by-Turn mapping for delivery
- View orders assigned to specific drivers
- Drag and drop to assign and dispatch delivery orders
- Integrated POS mapping interface
- Perfect for pizza delivery
The simple, yet powerful features make it possible to better run your delivery operations and communicate delivery information to your drivers. You can drag and drop to assign orders to drivers with Delivery Dispatch. You can dispatch delivery orders through text messaging, quickly add or remove drivers, and view orders assigned to specific drivers.
The most difficult part about running your organization is constantly delivering the best possible product upon request. You need smart delivery management software combining artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance performance.
Always look for an intuitively designed system that’s built to increase efficiency. This is necessary for the whole chain to easily work with the system.
Modern delivery dispatch systems are based on central Application Programming Interface. This way, they take advantage of the opportunities offered by the worldwide cloud. They enable easy updates and continuous innovating while improving connectivity across channels.
Final Thoughts
A reliable, flexible system is your trusted partner in any enterprise. Never cut corners when it comes to quality and read the fine print regardless of what product you ultimately end up choosing!