Lunch Garden

Knowing the company
Lunch Garden is Belgium's leading chain of self-service restaurants, with 1,500 employees. Each day, 63 outlets serve 53,000 customers from breakfast to dinner, generating around 30,000 transactions daily.

The key to Lunch Garden's success is its innovative 'free-flow' service model, in which customers can quickly and easily move between an array of counters to select a tailored meal with minimum queuing.

However, customer satisfaction requires more than easy meal selection. Lunch Garden must ensure its offerings are quality and value-for-money, that menus are refreshed while retaining favourite items, and that swift payment processes allow cooked meals to be eaten while still hot.

Defining the strategy
Thierry Bontinck, ICT manager, Lunch Garden, says, "All this demands we have 'free-flow' not just in the food service area but throughout our operation." In particular he identifies that:

• In order to be able to optimise the quality and availability of its offering, yet contain ingredient costs and wastage, Lunch Garden needs to be able to automate standard rules for ordering and stock management across all its outlets.

• To be able to set these rules sensibly, and also to plan customer-oriented enhancements yet control profitability, head office needs a query-able picture of organisation-wide sales, costs and margins.

• To minimise queues, the restaurants need a quick and reliable POS operation.

Choosing the solution
To support these requirements, Lunch Garden installed Torex OSCAR-POS.

Centralised Control
By integrating all the different points of service, and the back office, Torex OSCAR-POS provides a comprehensive picture of the organisation. This allows executives to accurately assess the performance of its different operations and make informed operational and strategic decisions.

For example, with a real-time view of sales, they can now order to accurately replenish used stock. This reduces wastage and ensures customers experience consistent product availability and freshness.

With data highlighting best-selling items, they can now confidently shape menus and promotions around customers' preferences.

Being able to easily track wholesale costs and margins, they can also respond immediately with price or menu changes and promotions, stimulating repeat custom through attractive offers while sustaining consistent profitability.

Such decisions can be effortlessly dispatched to all outlets via the POS units, without relying on staff to remember them.

Automated Performance Management
This new intelligence has enabled Lunch Garden to define an achievable acceptable standard of performance in each area of its business. Further, the Torex POS solution enables it to set key performance indicators (KPIs) locally, and the system automatically issues alerts to restaurant managers for any negative exceptions, such as orders on items with unprofitable margins, enabling them to take swift corrective action. Longer term, Lunch Garden plans to centralise this capability.

Easy to Use
The friendly, robust Torex touch-screens have also improved operations. Swifter transactions and improved till uptime mean shorter queues so customers can reliably eat hot meals.

Scalable
As Lunch Garden adds new outlets, Torex OSCARPOS will easily expand to support them without disrupting existing business.

Future Capability
Lunch Garden next plans to integrate the electronic funds transfer capability of Torex OSCAR-POS. This will not only improve POS efficiency further, but will cut the administrative effort of reconciling figures between two systems each day, and avoid the statistical discrepancies it currently experiences. A loyalty card programme will also be investigated in collaboration with Torex.

When it also upgrades with the next version of Torex OSCAR-POS, it expects to use the Torex KPI management capabilities to automatically re-order any stock running low.

Achieving return on investment
Bontinck says, "Before, we lacked control of our business. We didn't know exactly what had been sold. Therefore, we didn't really know what we needed to order; we didn't have a clear picture of outgoings; and because we didn't have the data to confirm what our most popular items were, menu updates and promotion initiatives relied on guesswork and could impact profitability. We had unnecessary
wastage, and budget blowouts. An inconsistent service also impacted
on customer satisfaction therefore the bottom line.

"By giving us 'free-flow' information Torex has enabled us to set and sustain standards we are proud of. We are now exciting customers with our product, engaging them with our service, and making sure they return," says Bontinck.

 

"The information and efficiency provided by Torex OSCAR-POS has enabled us to set and sustain standards we are proud of."

- Thierry Bontinck