Why going paperless goes beyond environmental benefit
Oracle Food and Beverage lists the added gains for using tech instead of paper.
Constant innovation and adaptation is a must in today’s competitive restaurant industry. Often to stay ahead of the curve, brands have to have a tight grasp on the pulse of the consumer.
Amongst the most significant trends right now is the growing push for environmentally friendly products and practices. With more consumers showing support for waste reduction programmes and other sustainability initiatives, even the biggest corporations are feeling the pressure to watch their carbon footprint.
This is the reason why many successful QSR brands are introducing initiatives such as digital receipts, more environmentally-friendly packaging, bring-your-own packaging campaigns, and transitioning to more locally sourced produce.
Paper waste is another issue in the industry. The receipts from each transaction alone are multiplied more than a hundredfold each day. For a restaurant chain with hundreds of outlets, the resulting waste is enormous.
One solution to address this is utilising modern technology to go paperless.
Fiona Southam, Sales Director ANZ at Oracle Food and Beverage, said that digital technology has evolved to a point where restaurants can fully automate and integrate solutions from the front to the back-end, extending beyond the restaurant walls to customers and suppliers through digital and online ordering and reservations, digital inventory management and supply chain management.
“Mobile reporting and analytics can now be accessed anywhere, anytime, in the palm of your hand through your smartphone – no need to print out reports and spreadsheets,” she said.
Transitioning to a paperless operation
What’s more, the benefits of going paperless can go beyond the environmental benefit of reducing waste.
Southam said that Oracle Food and Beverage’s mobile solutions, for instance, can allow restaurant managers to customize reports for mobile viewing, manage labor from anywhere at anytime, check and track inventory with paperless efficiency, and improve guest experience and staff productivity.
“Paperless systems can allow you to track the home delivery of your items to customers, improve the speed of service in-house by doing away with the need to jot down orders and records, and even determine wait times by tracking and analysing the time it takes from ordering at the table or in-store to the time the food gets to the customer,” she said.
Innovations such as Kitchen Display Systems (KDS), email receipts, and digital menu boards are all easy and convenient ways to transition your operation towards supporting paperless transactions.
Mobile order taking through kiosks or tablets, using mobile-friendly inventory management solutions to take stock, disabling automatic receipt printing, and utilising a multi-use POS device that can be used for typical paper functions like restaurant reservations, inventory, purchase orders, and taking orders are also proven ways to reduce paper waste while improving your operation’s efficiency.
Of course, all of this requires a not-so-insignificant cost to your business. Paper is cheap after all, and not every business can front the capital it takes to replace outdated technology.
Upgrading a POS System, such as Oracle’s MICROS products, to support paperless transactions, deploying tablets with a specialised interface for table-side ordering, or even finding a manager capable of handling such a transition - whilst requiring major investments - will provide long-term gain.
Aside from reducing paper waste, downsizing one’s carbon footprint and significantly helping the global push towards more sustainable businesses, going paperless with the right POS terminals can provide you with a modern system capable of providing real-time digital solutions and get you savings up sooner that can keep your brand ahead of the game.
