Recently, Street Fight published a piece on “How Forward-Thinking Brands Are Leveraging Automation” and in it they described how Dickey’s BBQ Franchise has introduced custom commands with Amazon’s Alexa in order to enable franchise owner-operators to periodically find out about real-time sales figures throughout the day. Those sales figures come from a data warehouse platform that Dickey’s BBQ Franchise business custom-developed to support their franchisees.
I know that one aspect of restaurant management is knowing if or when to “cut” kitchen and dining room support staff, depending on a restaurant’s traffic. If lunch or dinner appears to be slow for business, it is important to send waitpeople, busboys, and cooks home in order to reduce unnecessary costs. It sounds to me like this real-time feedback on sales figures is likely intended for this very purpose, since most restaurant owner-operators should know pretty closely exactly how much their daily operations cost, as well as exactly how much money they need to make per hour in order to at least break even, and maybe to even make a good profit. Read more