Centralizing Restaurant POS Menu Management

When every transaction counts more so than ever before in restaurants and food services, forward-thinking strategies around restaurant menu management have become more important than ever before. Central to that is how much leading organizations have risen to the occasion to streamline the way they manage they their offering and push the newest versions of menus to the point of sale, unified across locations and concepts.

Restaurants and managed food services rely on current data and the technology needed to find useful narratives about how to enhance performance and maximize returns, specifically at the menu item level. How does that work? What role does restaurant POS play in that process? Let’s take a look.

Finding the winners using restaurant point of sale

Organizations that manage multiple properties and concepts that may have items on the menu that appear under different customer-facing names. That means they require mechanisms to help them track item performance behind the scenes in an efficient way. Each item needs to be input, adjusted when necessary, removed when performance is low, and moved to the forefront when items sell well. Ideally, this happens in short order and the necessary changes are rolled out to every relevant location and concept automatically and simultaneously, appearing on the menu under the right name and at the right price. This means precise attention to detail that has to happen “above store”.

The restaurant point of sale that does this best will include functionality that allows operations to manage these elements centrally and at the SKU level. The point of sale provides a common and unified enterprise management platform to apply details like naming conventions, amendments, and other details, and allows centralized operations to roll them out at the same time to all locations and concepts. Further, it allows organizations to track items more easily, no matter how many guest-facing names are in play. This helps management teams to more easily identify winning SKUS and the locations in which they are selling best.

Gaining greater visibility and accuracy across all locations

Creating data-based decision-making processes around how items are organized centrally is a deciding factor to success in a changing restaurants and food services industry. When all items and the data attached to them can be viewed centrally, and can appear on easily generated and shared reporting, this has a significant positive impact on strategy. This can range from pricing adjustments, to daypart-specific promotions, to new ways to market items that have proven to be the most popular.

This visibility and a more data-driven approach to restaurant menu management is integral to honing an offering more intelligently. To support those efforts, restaurant and foodservice industry leaders are investing in cloud-based infrastructure that is inclusive of all properties, brands, sub-brands, food services concepts, and regions. With that, they’re able to “harmonize” items that may go under different names on menus depending on the context, but may also share the same SKU number. Management is better able to track item performance that helps to inform upsell opportunities on kiosk interfaces and digital display, new combos, and other marketing efforts that can be featured to encourage higher check values in all locations and concepts.

The keys to resilience

Restaurant and food services leaders are investing in technology that will help them to gain greater intelligence and control over a range of offering specific to restaurant brands, sub-brands, and managed food services concepts. This is one of the many ways that organizations are moving toward greater resilience during a particularly disruptive time in the history of the industry.

What are some other tactics that industry leaders are taking to help ensure resilience as times change and as culture and technology evolve together? To help to address this important question, we have created a substantial resource that focuses on best practices for restaurants and food services organizations to be resilient through present times, and be ready for what’s to come, too.