Let’s get this out of the way first: The quick-service industry is not known as an early adopter of technology.

This is not to say, however, that technology doesn’t play a crucial role in the success of the business. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. That’s why QSR launched the Applied Technology Awards, a program that seeks to honor operators and suppliers who are creating and employing technology that makes a difference for restaurants.

Judges for this year’s competition sorted through the entries and chose nine submissions worthy of honor. These entries span two distinct categories—innovation and enduring technology—and include one special recognition they couldn’t resist including.

Here we present the list of winners with a brief look at the development and implementation behind each.

Innovation

First Place:

Disney Guest-Activated Terminals

For Disney, customer convenience is the ultimate concern. More than 3.8 million guests are served annually at the Pecos Bill Tall Tale Inn and Café in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom Park, and with only eight POS terminals, that often resulted in long waits at peak meal times.

To solve the problem, Disney’s food and beverage and information technology teams put their heads together to develop self-order and -payment kiosks—they call them guest-activated terminals, or GATs—that help guests get their food 21 percent faster. Wait times to reach the terminals have shrunk to a minimal nine seconds, and transactions per hour through the kiosks during peak times are 17 percent higher than at cashier-tended stations.

But developing the technology was only one part of the equation; they also had to get guests to use the kiosks.

“When we were developing the user interface, our lead cashiers were part of the development team,” says Randy Chancey, manager of Walt Disney World Resort’s food and beverage systems. “We involved them very early in the process, and that helped with the buy-in.”

Chancey says the Disney cast members were instrumental in helping to make the technology user-friendly, and when the kiosks were finally rolled out last June, greeters were there to answer questions, and the collaboration paid off.

“For the most part, we didn’t notice any guest apprehension related to it,” Chancey says.

Second Place:

Strategic Restaurants Aloha eManager from Radiant Systems

Gathering and distributing information from multiple locations was a problem at Burger King franchisee group Strategic Restaurants Acquisition Corp., based in San Ramon, California. The company needed a way to manage point-of-sale (pos) configuration settings for its 250 locations.

“We are in seven states, so we’ve got a large footprint,” says David Knutson, director of IT services. “We have a lot of menu changes, coupons, and promotions, so we need to be able to react very quickly and get those changes into the stores as fast as we can.”

To do that, the company turned to Radiant Systems, a management software provider whose POS solution they were already using. Radiant’s Aloha eManager provides a centralized, Web-based system for executing pricing and other database changes in all the company’s restaurants.

It works like this: A centralized Internet database contains information like pricing, taxes, and employee rosters. When something changes—the price of an item goes up, sales tax rates change, or a new employee is hired—the information can easily be changed through the database, and scheduled updates are downloaded to POS terminals throughout the system. There’s no need to make manual changes in each location. Best of all, the system works with Aloha Point of Sale software.