Restaurant point of sale - what a menu management solution should do for you

For restaurants and food services organizations, the point of sale is a prime engine for success on all kinds of fronts. The POS certainly has an important role in keeping track of transactions and integrating with important elements like payment providers and gateways, gift and loyalty card programs, and to kitchen display solutions. All of that defines the experience for everyone in a single location. Yet, the point of sale has vital significance across properties and concepts, too.

An integral component to advanced restaurant point of sale solutions that are also applicable to food services contexts and concepts is a menu management solution that drives the item management, specials, combos, and overall menu item pricing side of POS. What does that entail? What are the key characteristics of a comprehensive menu management system at the heart of a cloud POS for restaurant locations and foodservices concepts? Let’s look at some of them.

Centralized control

In the restaurants and foodservices industry, creating visibility and uniformity across multiple locations is paramount to success. Centralizing and executing strategy through informed menu management is a key lever to effective operations that help organizations meet those goals more than ever. To do that in real-time is must, too. In this way, updating menus is instantaneous and timely wherever and whenever those changes are relevant.

Cloud-based management tools at the heart of point of sale solutions are powerful fulcrums to unify operations in single locations and create cohesion across properties as well. Effectively, this means moving away from piecemeal updates that keep locations in isolation which can affect how profitable those locations become. This extends beyond precise menu management. It’s also important to centralized POS configuration; adding new tenders and terminal buttons, discounts, and kitchen printers. This creates a more easily managed platform to support transactions across locations. But it also supports a cohesive offering all around.

A more uniform offering

When pricing, specials, and daypart-sensitive events (happy hour, breakfast hours, etc.) call for a certain consistency in every location and concept, an advanced menu management component to a restaurant point of sale solution makes all the difference. Among other things, this kind of solution helps to create a standardized experience for guests that touch on all the above events. But what it also helps to do is to keep staff up to date with the most recent information about menu items that certainly includes updated pricing, but also availability on items and current specials and combos.

Among other advantages, this is the way to help serving teams feel a greater sense of confidence when it comes to communicating with guests. Integrated with menu display solutions, they never have to second-guess whether what’s offered on the menu is current or not and at what price. This is better for helping to set and meet guest expectations, too. The right menu management system within cloud-based point of sale helps to ensure that what’s represented on the displayed menu at any given moment is a true reflection of the offering.

Better insights, better strategy

Once again, this isn’t just about a menu management. It’s about data. Each menu item attached to a transaction becomes the kind of business data that helps organizations to form more effective strategies. What does that look like in a practical sense? One area is that’s very basic, but that’s very important, is the ability to determine which items are selling, and which aren’t. In this, a robust reporting component that’s central to cloud-based POS is a vital part of strategy as much as it is central to more efficient operations.

A POS solution’s reporting capability is paramount to creating a data-driven strategy. When organizations can drill down at a menu item level to determine where they’re winning, and where they’re not, that becomes a powerful prospect. For foodservices organizations, standardizing items behind the scenes no matter how many names that same item may have across several concepts is that much more powerful, lending that many more insights as to how those items perform, and where they perform best.

Infor POS and Enterprise Manager

Enterprise Manager ensures that menu management and other point of sale functionality continues to connect with our customers’ real-world requirements. This means making sure that reports and their corresponding store locations and groups are easy to find and organize. The solution enables other essential day-to-day operational adjustments that make for more logical and intuitive workflows for everyone from serving staff, to kitchens, to back office, to analytics at head office

This solution works within Infor POS to help restaurants and food service organizations to make their operations more efficient and their business strategy more precise.

Learning more about how it works is easy.

Just click here.