SmartOrder Technology is a software company that provides innovative portable tablet technology solution to improve the overall dining experience. The company uses Google android operation system and Apple iOS as its foundation, and with the help of web technology to improve the customer user experience.
The motivation behind the company came from a common problem when dining in a restaurant. The most common problem that you encounter is probably waiting to order food, drinks or even the bill. This problem not only affects customers but also affects the restaurant owner. Customers spend most of their time waiting to order food, which makes the restaurant less productive in maximising their revenue. For many customers, their intention is to finish their meal and leave the restaurant.
Secondly, the cost of running a restaurant increases year after year. For example, in the UK the minimum wage has gone from 5.05 in 2006 to 6.08 in 2012, that's 20% of incensement in just five years. Living in London for about a year I know that the restaurants are paying higher wages than the minimum wage. Therefore, restaurants are always trying to decrease the number of employees. Human errors also create issues for restaurant owners, order duplication, miss communication, error in order priority. All these create a negative impression to the customers and decrease customer satisfaction, as a result the customer may not want to return in the future.
The solution to the problem is to build a self-servicing system that allows customers to order at their table by engaging the menu application on a portable, web-enabled, interactive touch screen device. A self-service menu linked to different units in the restaurant, creates a myriad of operations-enhancing benefits that virtually guarantee incremental revenue and profit for the restaurant.
Self-servicing system was introduced over five years ago, but at that time the implementation cost was over the possible return profit. Therefore, has never been deployed in major restaurants. At that time, a simple self-ordering system require large amount of investment. However in recent year, the advancement of the tablet device has been very rapid. Five years ago, a normal tablet would have cost over HK$ 5,000 with a very bad specification. However, nowadays you would be able to buy a reasonable good specification tablet in most electronic retailers for only HK$ 1,000. In addition, customers are now more familiar to self-servicing, retailer like Tesco, M&S introduced self-servicing for over five years and perfer using portable touch screen electronic device (i.e. smartphone, ipad).
In terms of the market size, within the US market there are already 935,000 restaurants in 2007 and the number of restaurants are expected to grow. In addition, with the internet selling platform SmartOrder would be able to service clients at an international scale. Currently, over 98% of the restaurants are still using the old fashion Point-of-sale system and some are even using traditional hand writing method to take customer orders. Moreover, SmartOrder not only can be used in restaurants but can be implement in bars, clubs and even for an event. The automation of restaurant operations will be the next evolution in the future.
In the future plan, we are looking forward to explore other source of revenues. For example, new revenues can be generated by introducing advertising. Secondly, within five years time NFC (Near Field Communication) technology will rapidly be replacing the existing credit card payment and most smart device also embedded this function. Therefore, including this in the future plan we can make self-servicing even more convenient to customers. By introducing service charge on NFC payment (i.e. most bank charge 0.03% for each bill) this will be addition revenue in the future. Finally, as SmartOrder will contain a large database from restaurant clients. We can sell these data and generate a report for sale, for example what kind of food is most favoured in a specified area.
Unlike other restaurant POS system company, SmartOrder Technology's market strategy is to gain the market share as rapid as possible by designing our product which allows optimizing the installation process by automating ours operation and also target for a lower price tag in the market. We also employed web technology for customer to customise their restaurant menu, and also include extra functions like reporting. This method can centralise customers servicing on one web system and reduce the operation resource to service individual customers.
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