As one who is rather long in the tooth, I’m able to recall an era in retailing when the world wasn’t driven by branding – at least not to the extent that it is nowadays. Back then, a coffee was a coffee and a burger was something the Americans were fond of.

During my time as Special Projects Director with Compass Catering, as the B&I giant was known in pre-Eurest days, I was part of a team tasked with the unimaginable: selling the features and benefits of High Street branded food offers to corporate and hospitality operators.The goal in those days was to move clients towards ‘zero-subsidy’ by adopting a retail ethos of good service coupled with recognisable, branded food offers. Believe it or not, it was a hard sell. During the last 15 years though, the pace of change has been accelerating – particularly in the hospitality sector. Branded offers are commonplace, even expected; thus, the emphasis has shifted.What matters now, in an age of savvy consumers, is customer-focused service coupled with realtime access to management information, enabling operators to satisfy the most demanding expectations, consequently increasing footfall and boosting spend per head.

The major driver of this is technological innovation. EPoS, or Electronic Point of Sale, is wall-to-wall these days, and a prime example of technology driving business. The frontrunners in this sector in the U.K., include MCR Systems, VMC, Xpress Ordering, Micros and GiroVend and behind the familiar touchscreens lurk electronic brains that, for people of my generation, seem more Dr Who than Dr Pepper. For example, MCR Systems’ Symphony reporting system wouldn’t seem out of place in the Tardis, designed as it is to deliver a timewarp leap in business performance.

MCR has over twenty years’ experience in hospitality EPoS and Management Systems, culminating in an integrated and functionally rich reporting & digital dashboard system designed specifically to meet the needs of the hospitality industry.

The Symphony web enabled architecture acts as a control hub for an organisation’s EPoS systems network. At the touch of a button, one can monitor and control every EPoS device across an estate. Combined with Real Time Reporting, users have the tools to respond to changes as they happen. At the back end of Symphony Reporting is tried and tested software based on the latest Microsoft Business Intelligence architecture, which allows clients to make better decisions, implement tighter controls and ease administrative tasks. Combining the control of centralised data with the flexibility of local autonomy has long been the Holy Grail for data administrators.

Symphony Enterprise uses a unique Genetic Data Maintenance approach to allow users to manage individual components of their data records at any level of the corporate hierarchy, this allows for data to evolve in order to meet the needs of a specific trading environment - without the need for duplicating data. Symphony was designed from the ground up as a scalable business management platform and users can connect from any location to manage and control all sites that they have been authorised to access. So for example, a site manager can oversee his/her own performance, an area manager can oversee all the units within his / her remit and, at Head Office, those who need to control the entire estate can do so from their desk-top, via a ‘digital dashboard’ in which KPI’s are refreshed in real time.

Intelligent back-of-house installations are able to define the perfect consumer offer, but what about delivering the perfect consumer experience?

Back in the day – OK, my day – the problems revolved around queuing.You could waste half your lunch break while dithery Doris from dispatch rummaged through her hand bag for her last pound note, or while Kathy at the cafe changed her mind from ‘sarnie’ to salad and back again; an angry snake of hungry punters hissing in her wake.

Queues, adios! Xpress Ordering has expanded its kiosk system – that enables customers order their lunchtime sandwich in advance from remote touch-screen kiosks – to encompass the Internet. Customers can now order lunch from their desks or, come to that, from the traffic jam on the M25 – although that’s not recommended! 

Xpress Ordering’s deceptively simple system does more than bust queues: the multiple-choice sandwich construction interface delivers improved spend per head, to boot. VMC’s Metro product pushes the queuebusting envelope even further: theirs is the only system (to my knowledge) that allows two cashless card readers to operate from one till.We’re not just talking queue-busting here: think reduced staff numbers for a start
and add to that the fact that a facility is more attractive to customers when they know they’re not going to be stuck in a bottleneck while their food gets cold and it all adds up…

We’ve come a long way.You could argue that, until the nineties, hospitality outlets were simply glossy variations on the theme of the wartime canteen.Then came branding and the quest to emulate the High Street: now though, the hospitality sector, it seems to me, is at the leading edge of food retailing, and it’s the High Street that’s playing catch-up.

Ian Reynolds is Director of Public Relations
at Appleby Bowers Creative Consultants,
telephone 0161 773 5553