Apart from the food and the fixed costs, there is one more primary cost the restaurant incurs on a daily basis, which if not monitored diligently can burn a hole in your pockets. Yes, you have guessed it right it is the restaurant labor cost.Understanding that competent labor is the nerve center of your restaurant business, whose efficient customer service can help your restaurant brand grow like never before isn’t that difficult.However, it must be stated at the very beginning, that the restaurant industry in the USA is notorious for high employee attrition rate. It is estimated that.As per a recent study from, the cost of losing and replacing one hourly employee can be as high as $5,864. Considering that the turnover rate is 70%, one can only imagine how much restaurants lose out their money on.
Hence, it becomes important for restaurant owners in the US to find effective ways to reduce their dependency on the manual labor and reduce their restaurant labor cost, and one of the best ways to do so is by taking refuge in a stellar restaurant management system.Having an efficient restaurant POS on board will help you reduce your restaurant labor cost considerably, since the POS will automate most of your restaurant operations, and this will help you to run your restaurant with limited staff. From billing, KOT generation, inventory management, to creating a comprehensive CRM everything will be automated with a stellar restaurant management system. 4 Ways Technology Will Help You Reduce Your Restaurant Labor CostReducing dependency on manual labor is a task that all restaurant owners are striving hard to master.
One of the easiest ways of doing so is by employing technology that will automate the entire restaurant operations. Automating The Order TakingYou can reduce the need for manual labor by introducing Tablet Ordering at your restaurant. The customers can view the entire menu display on the Tablet and place the order themselves. The order is automatically pushed into the POS and an instant KOT is generated.Tablet ordering reduces the order taking time and allows you to serve more tables with less number of servers, thus reducing your restaurant labor cost. Automating The Order Preparation ProcessOnce a customer places an order it becomes the responsibility of the server to take the KOT to the kitchen and hand it over to the concerned person there, and only then will the preparation of the items start. However, if you have a stellar restaurant POS on board, it will help you to accelerate the entire process.When a customer places an order, the KOT system when synced with the Kitchen Display System will reflect the orders in real-time.
A new study has found that implementation of digital technology has enabled procurement organizations to reduce their full-time workers by an average of 29 percent, lowering labor costs by 22 percent. Labour market information can help you make a good decision when you want to change jobs or move to a new place. It can help you find out what the labour market is like for that job or that city. For example, if you are a machinist and you move to a town with no factories, you will have a hard time finding a job.
This will help the kitchen staff to start their preparation without any delays. Hence an helps in turn in reducing the table turnover time. Also, void KOTs or changes in the orders and other such specifics gets reflected in the KDS automatically.This helps in minimizing the scope of manual mistakes to a great extent.
In addition to this, it will give the servers time to cater to an increased number of tables.This directly impacts customer satisfaction since it takes you less time to communicate, prepare and deliver the order. While delivering a should and must be your primary concern, this will help you to keep your customers happy, which in turn will increase your chances of retaining them. Automating The InventoryThe rising food costs in the US call for a strong focus on stock and inventory management. However, keeping a tab on stock and inventory manually is a task that is extremely difficult to perform in the best way possible. Manual check opens a lot of scope of mistakes, and it leaves the chances of inventory loss through internal theft and pilferage.In order to avoid such instances, it is exceptionally important that you install a robust restaurant POS which will help you in real-time stock and inventory calculations, which in turn will reduce your dependency on manual labor. A restaurant management system will automate your restaurant’s stock and inventory completely:.
It gives you the opening and the closing inventory, along with the stock in and the stock out of every outlet on a daily basis. This will help you tally the physical stock available and the ideal stock automatically. It will send you real-time alerts whenever an item in the inventory reaches its reorder level, or whenever an item reaches its expiry date. This negates the need for you to depend on your restaurant’s staff to check the inventory and then place the order, which might often be overlooked. While running multiple outlets, an efficient POS will optimize the entire process by helping the restaurant owner to receive details sales, inventory, CRM reports of different outlets in real-time. All there reports can also be compared, that will help you analyze changes that must be brought forth that will augment your sales further.4. Automating The CRMManually taking the customer feedback and them updating the customer information in the system, leaves the scope if instances of misplaced information.
In addition to this since it is a time-consuming affair, many times it is often ignored and not done diligently by the restaurant staff.However, creating a comprehensive CRM is extremely important, since you can run from the customer information garnered, which is imperative if you want to build a band of loyal customers.With a robust restaurant POS, once you take the customer feedback on the floor of the restaurant, the customer information automatically gets synced in the CRM database. This nullifies the need for any restaurant staff to manually insert all the customer information. Not only is this less time-consuming, and accelerates the entire process, it also leaves helps the restaurant to create a rich CRM, leveraging which you can craft stellar marketing campaigns.
Employee ManagementManaging the restaurant staff is efficiently is essential if you want to keep your restaurant labor cost in check. A smart restaurant POS system helps you monitor the performance of your restaurant staff by analyzing the number of items they have sold or upsold, the number of tables served, and their service feedback received from customers. Based on this data, you can incentivize the high-performing employees, and further train the ones that are not performing as well.With the labor turnover rate, restaurants in the US are looking for quick hacks that will reduce their dependencies on manual labor while optimizing the entire restaurant operations. Having a restaurant POS on board will solve half of your problems and will help you take your dream a step closer to running a successful restaurant business. Restaurant Times is an online publication for everyone who is interested in Restaurants and Food & Business Industry. Get Latest Updates and Trending News from the world of Restaurants.
Discover how you can grow your Restaurant Business and overcome different challenges. Focused on all aspects of Restaurant Business from Interior Design to Menu Design, you can get helpful content on different problems you face while running your Restaurant such as Food Wastage, Internal Thefts & Pilferage, Customer Attrition, Hiring Staff and overall Restaurant Business Management issues. Restaurant Times covers a wide array of topics such as Restaurant Marketing, Operations, Kitchen Management and overall Restaurant Management. You can improve your Restaurant business by downloading our ready to use resources such as Restaurant Manager Duties Checklist, Essential Restaurant Equipment List, Liquor Cost Control Kit, Restaurant Business Plan & more.
Editor’s note: statistics cited in this piece come from theon the impacts of technology on employment.U.S. Manufacturing has seen tough times over the past few decades.
Employment in that sector has dropped from around 14 percent of the U.S. Workforce in 1996 to almost 8 percent now. Many jobs have shifted overseas as employers seek low-cost labor and nations with fewer safety and environmental regulations.But in recent years, the outlook has turned more bullish. There has been a resurgence in American manufacturing.
After reaching a low point of 11.5 million jobs in 2010, manufacturing employment increased to around 12.3 million in 2016. That still is down from 14.5 million in 2006, but better than the depths of the Great Recession.Indeed, a found that manufacturing output has achieved a record high in the most recent quarter. Workers now are producing 47 percent more than 20 years ago. Through the development of automation, robotics, and advanced manufacturing, the sector has bounced back along with the overall economy.Technology is one of the reasons for this resurgence. We are seeing the rise of automation and robotics in many sectors. Some restaurants now are using robots to deliver food and are deploying self-ordering kiosks for customers. There are driverless cars in California, Washington, and Texas.
Amazon now has around 15,000 robots who work along its 50,000 humans.The number of industrial robots is rising. In 2013, there were 1.2 million robots in factories and warehouses. The total rose to 1.5 million in 2014 and is expected to increase to 1.9 million next year. Japan leads the way in use of industrial robots with over 306,000 robots in use, compared to 237,000 in North America, 182,000 in China, and 175,000 in South Korea and Germany each.Robots are getting more sophisticated and adept at performing complex tasks. The cost differential with humans is narrowing, to the advantage of robots. The Wendy’s restaurant chain recently announced that it was for ordering in its 6,000 restaurants.Estimates for labor cost savings in various countries through automation and robotics now are averaging around 16 percent in industrialized nations.
But places such as South Korea have seen 33 percent cost savings, and Japan has seen a 25 percent savings.The convergence of these developments means that robots are helping to increase overall output and save money, but not helping to add jobs. In looking at data from 2010 to 2016, manufacturing has seen 10 to 20 percent increases in output, but only a 2 to 5 percent increase in jobs. Edited by and 2015The slow growth of manufacturing jobs has troubling ramifications for employment patterns and the overall workforce.
According to, “if current trends continue, it could well be that a generation from now a quarter of middle-aged men will be out of work at any given moment”. That has enormous political and social consequences. It helps us to understand the 2016 electoral success both of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Voters have a sense that things are not going well for working class votes and may actually get worse. Those individuals are understandably worried and anxious.Future job projections from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that most job creation over the next decade is going to come in health care and professional services. Indeed, by 2022, manufacturing jobs are expected to drop.This means that schools need to restructure their curricula so that students get better training in science, technology, engineering, and math.
There is a great need for workers with STEM skills as systems analysts, software developers, and biomedical engineers, among other professions. The policy challenges for manufacturing are enormous. The country needs to invest in infrastructure, reform tax policy, and boost trade and global markets. The world is at an inflection point in a number of these areas, and there are many threats to globalization and free trade today.Small firms are particularly at risk. They create many of the jobs in the United States, but it is hard for them to achieve the economies of scale and productivity boosts of advanced manufacturing. High upfront costs make it difficult to adopt the latest technologies and compete for workers with the most advanced skills.Maintaining competitiveness amidst these domestic and global challenges is a big issue for many firms.
Companies need to invest in technology, deploy data analytics, and embrace emerging tools such as 3-D printing and smart appliances. Those that do this will be able to compete while others get left behind.