In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants are facing some of the toughest challenges the industry has ever seen. However, with smart strategies driven by accurate, accessible data, many brands have been able to weather the storm.
Yet gathering and sharing data within an organization has traditionally come with its own challenges. For example, while most departments in an organization need access to various data sets, the ways they use that data to interpret results, make decisions, and even the tools they use to analyze it vary significantly. This makes it difficult for departments, such as HR, marketing, loss prevention, and treasury and finance among others, to pool resources, leading to company-wide inefficiencies and roadblocks.
Now, however, data can be made easy with the right tools, and restaurants have better access to company-wide financial data today than ever before through Loomis’s PlatformSync solution. This offering is unique to Loomis’s PlatformSync and connects to Loomis’ Titan smart safe ecosystem, where it records raw information from each safe, and then reports the brand’s cash situation back to the brand in near-real time, along with other information, such as cash drops, courier events, coins and bills dispensed, and door events. Then, through the PlatformSync API, restaurants have the flexibility to feed that information to any reporting system they choose.
For example, a loss prevention manager might check reports on cash variances to track down internal theft or check timestamps from when safe doors were opened to determine whether any abnormal behavior occurred. Meanwhile, the treasury department might see when cash on-hands were last reported to determine if a safe is offline or if the restaurant is not recycling low value notes, such as ones and fives. At the same time, operations managers or regional managers can get an accurate depiction of whether brands are following corporate cash handling procedures.
Best of all, PlatformSync is included for restaurants that already use Loomis’s Titan smart safes. It is also simple to set up—particularly for brands that have IT support—and can be up and running within a few hours. In fact, the Loomis team reports that the API is so easy to install, a Hardee’s franchisee was able to set up and begin running the system from start to finish within a single conference call.
Loomis also provides a playbook, which walks brand leaders or IT support through the setup process and details the types of information that will be available to restaurants once PlatformSync is implemented. Additionally, brands that want to link PlatformSync to their POS for further insights may do so by linking their back office ERP system to the API and then pushing it down to their restaurant-level POS system, giving brands flexibility not only in which POS vendors they work with, but also in how they choose to record and analyze the data.
Though operational challenges abound, particularly in the age of COVID, restaurants do not have to live with inefficient, siloed data and reporting. PlatformSync can help restaurants gain back efficiency at all levels of the organization.
To learn more about how you can use PlatformSync to manage data, visit loomis.us.
By Peggy Carouthers
