Current technological trends in HoReCa

Dmitry Papin, CEO iiko noted that the most technological segment of the Horeca industry is delivery. According to him, this is the very case when everything should be fast, high-quality and inexpensive. When ordering delivery, the client wants not only to get his dishes as soon as possible, but also to know the exact waiting time. At the same time, accuracy turns out to be more important than speed. According to research, with the same delivery time, those who received their order exactly on the promised date are 40% more likely to re-order than those who were promised a shorter time, but as a result they brought the order late.

Therefore, we are now developing a new Smart Kitchen technology that optimizes production and logistics resources, the expert shared. - This will not only reduce costs within processes, but also ensure that the exact delivery time at the time of order is displayed in the guest application, on the site, in the call center operator interface and any other similar places.

Dmitry Lebedenko, Managing Partner of SteadyControl HoReCa, focused on human resources control and management systems that can bring together the latest AI technologies, audio and video analytics data with modern management practices. To manage business processes, such a system connects to cameras, microphones and cash management software, automatically analyzes compliance with work standards and reflects statistics in the online platform up to the personal dynamics of improvements in each line employee. A comprehensive approach of such a system is used byDodo Pizza, PIMS,Pizza Factory, Sushi Wok, ROSTIC'S, Percini, Wavelberg Hotel, Green Flow and dozens of other Russian and foreign companies.

According to Mikhail Taran, Director for Industry Development, Okdesk automation of service processes in modern business, especially in the field of catering and trade, is becoming an integral part of successful management. Competition in this area is great, and companies are forced to think not only about tasty food, designer interiors or high-school waiters, but about the comprehensive provision of a high-level catering service.

The expert also noted the growing trend for robotization in the restaurant business^[1], where consultant robots, cleaning robots and so on are already used.

Soon we will not be surprised by a robot waiter, a robot bartender, a robot cashier, a robot cook, he suggested.

This trend should be an additional burden on service companies in terms of additional repair and scheduled maintenance work. And when servicing complex technical devices, engineers will be helped by checklists and knowledge bases implemented in modern Help Desk systems.

The expert also noted a trend towards the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the restaurant business to improve the quality of service, reduce warehouse costs and automate the preparation and delivery of food.

Igor Vaag, Deputy General Director of ATOL, said that his company sees great potential in using the Internet of Things, augmented reality, voice assistants and chat bots to automate interaction with restaurant guests. Also, in his opinion, a promising direction is the use of blockchain to increase the transparency of financial transactions and customer confidence.

Separately, the development of contactless payment methods can be noted, which is especially important in the post-covid period, the expert said.

According to him, in a competitive environment, a culture of conceptual institutions is developing that want to surprise customers with their unique solutions. They actively integrate electronic menus with the ability to order and pay without involving waiters. For example, in the Roller restaurant in Sochi Park, after choosing positions on the tablet, food and drinks are delivered to the client's table on the rails - this leaves a bright impression on visitors.

According to Nikolai Nikolenko, technical director of KODE, IoT makes it possible to independently control many processes, excludes human errors, speeds up the reporting of information, and therefore decision-making. Big data, as well as BI are used to compile a menu taking into account the forecast of demand, user preferences and margin of each position, to set prices for numbers depending on load, prices for competitors, weather, events, and in many other tasks where you need to make a decision quickly or help make a decision to a person by analyzing a large amount of information. The expert also believes that the scope of AI is limited only by imagination and budget, but sometimes a person copes with various tasks better and several times cheaper.

Dmitry Agamaliev, marketer of the IT company Mintrocket, relies on AI: algorithms that will take into account visitors' kitchen preferences based on previous orders will be massively distributed in mobile applications for restaurants in the future. Similar solutions have already been implemented and shown to be effective in retail and fintech, and now it is Horeca's turn.

Mobile apps

As Dmitry Papin said, the market for mobile applications in catering is alive: restaurant guests and delivery customers continue to use such products with pleasure. At the same time, restaurateurs do not need to invest a lot of money in their development - there are many convenient ready-made subscription designers. There are no problems with Google Play - restaurant applications are not blocked there. The market only had to adjust to shutting down Google Pay, where it was possible to store vollets, but this was not such a difficult task. In addition, there are applications and bots in Telegram, QR menus and other features.

You can not limit yourself and use all channels for sales at once, the expert recommends.

The demand for automation of the order process is steadily growing and will continue to grow in the coming years, said Violetta Gostishcheva, head of the Tavern department at SoftBalance.

Over the past two years, we and our fellow developers have found ways to ensure uninterrupted operation for our users both on Google Play and in other app stores, the specialist noted.

Thanks to the development of mobile CRM marketing and the industry as a whole, large representatives of Horeca can begin to create their own services and digital ecosystems. It is too early to say that sites are shifting their focus, Dmitry Agamaliev believes.

We do not see such a trend in our practice. On the contrary, the demand for mobile development for restaurants is growing faster than for the creation of sites for the same restaurants, the specialist shared. - We are also seeing a new trend: our customers increasingly want to publish the application in RuStore.

According to him, through the mobile application, new users order food less often than through the site. And the mobile application is used as a platform for repeated orders.

Dmitry Agamaliev noted a wide variety of applications for ordering food, as well as the fact that although Google Play is now more strictly moderating projects, in general there are no serious difficulties in this industry.

Mintrocket, whose specialization is more related to mobile development, sees a clear trend - the volume of investments in Horeca digitalization will increase, he said. - We are increasingly receiving requests to develop applications for this segment. Such requests have increased by 35% compared to 2023.

The segment was not badly affected by the decisions of the storks in 2022, Nikolai Nikolenko confirmed. But the general signal to the market, as well as, in general, fluctuations on the implementation of the service in the application format - all this made many take a different look at the sites and PWA, the expert said.

Persuading a person to download an application, and even more so to register in it, is a very difficult task. Not many cope with it, - said the expert.

Boxed solutions

The speed and depth of digitalization depends on the size of the enterprise on the basis of which the solution is being implemented, as well as on its profitability.

Boxed solutions are not so expensive, so their importance for Horeca digitalization is much higher than custom development, since they can be implemented en masse. As a rule, such solutions use a standard set of tools necessary for almost any restaurant or hotel business.

Boxed solutions or creating your own software on designers using No-Code - these options are best suited for small organizations, Mintrocket experts say. As Dmitry Agamaliev said, SMBs often offer a boxed solution, since it usually includes technical support, and does not require additional costs for maintaining the IT department.

If we talk about mobile development for a restaurant, the basic sections are considered a catalog, basket, loyalty programs, promotional codes. But not every project will be relevant, for example, geo push notifications or the presence of a separate interface for the courier. And there are businesses that need this functionality, but there will never be such opportunities in the "box." This is where custom development is needed.

Box solutions at Horeca are an excellent basis for automating the restaurant business, but they cannot always fully satisfy all the needs of each institution, Igor Vaag believes. Therefore, it is often necessary to adapt and refine such solutions to the individual needs of a restaurant or cafe chain.

According to the expert, great attention should be paid to integrating equipment with many software products for Horeca, setting up compatibility with the most popular and popular restaurant automation systems. This allows customers to choose the optimal solutions for their tasks, not limited to standard "boxed" options.

Thus, ATOL is actively developing a line of equipment running Russian operating systems. This is especially true in light of the exchange rate for import substitution and reducing dependence on foreign technologies.

Dmitry Lebedenko said that within the framework of one business it is almost impossible to develop a functionally competitive information product. It is even more difficult to maintain this competitiveness over a long distance. It is much more rational to find a reliable integrator-partner who is able to flexibly approach the implementation and refine the existing solution for specific business needs or constantly improve in the context of a dynamically changing market. The expert believes that only a large restaurateur can afford his own solution, but in the long term, he is likely to lose to a professional developer and integrator.

According to Mikhail Taran, boxed solutions can meet the basic needs of most institutions in the Horeca sector. The convenience is that modern systems allow you to quickly start working without significant investments, many solutions from different industries have already carried out work on integration with catering automation systems and they are available out of the box without requiring developers and additional costs.

Dmitry Papin noted that for many enterprises the iiko functionality is enough - it supports all the main processes. In addition, there is an iikoStore, where you can choose a ready-made solution for additional tasks. If you need to implement some unique query, then you can use the open API and the help of the integration command. According to the expert, it is very long and expensive to develop a solution from scratch, so there are only a few on this path.

Violetta Gostishcheva also confirmed the consensus of market specialists: box solutions in Horeca are able to satisfy all market needs. A modular system, when the user acquires only the functionality that he will actually use, flexible settings that take into account various schemes of work, technical support from the developer - all this allows you to save on expensive improvements, which helps when scaling the business. Of course, there are also companies that consider their organizational model unique. But in 90% of cases, competent consulting, optimization of business processes and voicing the cost of improvements make it possible to avoid "amateur performances." In general, boxed solutions have now become more flexible and adaptive to the needs of the market, the specialist noted.

Corporate identity, caring for the user, simplifying complex processes through the application is difficult to repeat and make universal for different companies, Nikolai Nikolenko believes.

We always say that any development is an investment. Therefore, as soon as the business understands how much it will be able to earn in the end with the help of a new service, the question of "do or not" is resolved quite quickly, - said the expert.

According to him, in many ways, existing boxed solutions provide a quick start and an opportunity to understand what is missing. Some solutions become industry standards, like iiko and R-Keeper. Often this is quite enough for basic digitalization and control. Some services are good only for starting, but later companies still create their own solutions for internal processes and end users. The trigger question initiating the transition may be "what the new service will give." Sometimes this may not be a direct profit, but a reduction in the risks of disconnection from the formed flow of customers.

Exhibition of achievements

As Dmitry Lebedenko said, the SteadyControl human resources control and management system is an excellent example of symbiosis of technologies, methodology and support, which provides the necessary flexibility when implemented in any business. The system solves the problem of low personnel efficiency. Whether we are talking about a waiter in a restaurant, a cashier in a store, a car dealership manager or a medical center administrator, the business problem is identical everywhere: employees do not fulfill their official duties.

{{quote 'In the early stages of the development of technologies for personnel management, we had to sober up the business, openly speaking about problems that most simply denied, "the expert shared. - Today we see that pains are formed, and the industry is actively looking for a solution. }}

Also, the system is able to automatically provide data on the patterns of behavior of guests, the quality and stability of the service, the visual quality of dishes, serving, sanitation and much more.

The key is to go from the problem, and not from the technology, - the expert believes. - An effective application solution to understandable and often primitive problems gives a much better result than attempts to implement a hype gadget without proven effectiveness and proven application methodology.

Dmitry Papin confirmed that more than 2,000 new enterprises are connected to the iiko circulation solution every month. At the same time, the specifics of the business are such that the company's cloud processes from 50,000 requests per second in normal mode, and during peak hours the load can increase sharply to 500,000, given that customers, especially delivery services, are very sensitive to the stability of the program.

According to him, the company manages to maintain an affordable price for users, although all advanced technologies are used at the infrastructure and architecture level, and the development team and devops constantly monitor the emergence of new technologies, choose and implement the best.

Since 2018, iiko has been developing forecasting and automatic resource planning. The system predicts sales volume, makes calculation of necessary ingredients and sends orders to suppliers, and creates a plan to prepare blanks for cooks in the kitchen or in the central production of the restaurant chain. This tool allows you to automate management work, which saves the time of the most expensive specialists and the owner of the enterprise himself.

AI also has a perspective - for example, we taught our built-in delivery site to generate beautiful images of dishes according to the description, - said the expert. - It often happens that delivery must be launched tomorrow, but there is no site. From iiko, such a site can be deployed in 2 minutes, and AI allows you to solve the problem with photos of dishes quickly and without the cost of a food photographer.

Violetta Gostishcheva proudly said that objectively the strongest aspect of Tavern is the support of state systems. Moreover, most of the requests from customers are associated precisely with changes in legislation. The main point of contact with the user is technical support. In addition, the specialist said, the operational collection of feedback is facilitated by its own partner network of integrator companies in the Russian Federation and the CIS countries. All this allows the company to keep abreast of the problems of both individual institutions and the industry as a whole, timely developing software products.

Mikhail Taran believes that the common problems in any business, and even more so in the restaurant, are personnel turnover and the need to quickly respond to breakdowns, and based on these "pains," his company has focused on developing a convenient and functional mobile application that allows you to quickly fix the problem with a camera (photo breakdowns or scanning QR code equipment allows you to speed up the process of registering applications). Also, employees can simply dictate the problem, which is especially convenient in conditions of limited time, and the system converts voice into text. In addition, the intuitive design of Okdesk allows employees of all ages and with different levels of technical training to manage it. This solution for automation of service, technical support and field service in the internal processes of chain restaurants can be used both in the field of IT, and in the services of technical service, cleaning and others, where high-quality service of facilities is important, the expert concluded.

No longer innovative, but still often used approach is the introduction of AI and machine learning for various kinds of processes, Nikolai Nikolenko said.

We implemented solutions from automatic formation of orders to suppliers, based on the approved menu, to checking the cleaning of the photo room, "he said.

Also in the KODE piggy bank there are solutions based on BLE and iBeacon technologies: an electronic key for a number, an electronic parking pass, automatic barriers and gates for access control, navigation inside the premises and territory of complexes with automatic informing the user about what is happening in this place and what services are available.

One of the cases is the implementation of a system for combining orders to reduce the cost of delivery and reduce waiting time, as well as an AI-based system that calculates and controls the start time of cooking a dish so that it is delivered as quickly as possible.