The quick-service restaurant industry has seen exponential global growth, driven by changing consumer preferences and the demands of an increasingly fast-paced lifestyle. Today’s consumers expect not only high quality but also impeccable consistency from restaurants. Simultaneously, labor shortages and rising material costs put immense pressure on daily operations. Optimizing every facet of the business in this high-stakes environment is no longer optional—it’s essential.
As competition intensifies and profit margins shrink, restaurants that fail to fully embrace digital ordering tools risk falling behind. While many have taken the first step by adopting these solutions, few are tapping into their full potential—missing out on valuable opportunities to drive efficiency and growth.
To stay ahead in today’s market, it’s crucial to fully understand and utilize the capabilities online ordering systems can bring. Here are five ways restaurants can use these tools to transform operations and boost the bottom line before the competition pulls ahead.
1. Understand Every Platform Feature
Failing to grasp the full capabilities of a platform leads to missed opportunities for cost savings, weakens customer service, and reduces operational efficiency. It’s like using a smartphone just to make phone calls—barely scratching the surface of its potential. When it comes to e-commerce, advanced platforms are designed to do far more than basic ordering, and failing to tap into their full capabilities results in lost performance and efficiency.
Instead of limiting these tools to basic tasks, leverage their features to streamline everyday processes. For example, inventory tracking allows staff to monitor supplier stock levels in real time, ensuring orders are placed at the right time to avoid shortages or price hikes. Relying on phone calls or emails to place orders increases the possibility of forgetting to place an order or accidentally spending on the wrong item type or quantity. Automated reordering can eliminate this by streamlining frequent purchases based on pre-defined criteria, reducing the need for manual stock checks.
Additionally, advanced search and filtering options can help busy kitchens find the products they need quickly and accurately—no more flipping through endless catalogs. In the same way, smartphones use autocorrect, fuzzy search capabilities that allow the platform to infer what users need based on browsing or purchase history.
Fully exploring and utilizing advanced features can unlock significant cost savings and operational efficiency opportunities. Embrace these tools to streamline processes, prevent mistakes, and enhance overall performance—transforming the platform from a basic assistant into a powerful asset for the business.
2. Train Staff Thoroughly
E-commerce platforms are only as good as the people using them. Failing to train staff on a platform’s full capabilities can lead to costly mistakes like misplaced orders, missed restocks, and overtime hours. Valuable features like automated reordering and real-time inventory tracking can also go underutilized, exposing the inefficiencies these systems are designed to avoid—and negating the very benefits they’re built to offer.
The solution is simple: thorough training. While most platforms are user-friendly, taking time to walk every team member through these tools ensures they are used to their maximum potential. A well-trained staff can take full advantage of time-saving features, like automated reordering and inventory management, ensuring that valuable manual labor is spent on more strategic tasks like improving customer service.
After staff are fully trained, team leads can work with platform providers to conduct comprehensive onboarding and schedule refresher sessions as needed. Streamline future employee training by implementing clear Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), so new hires down the road can easily reference how to place orders, manage inventory, and resolve supplier issues to ensure consistency and accuracy.
Ongoing feedback, performance monitoring, and support will align the team and ensure the platform becomes a valuable asset to overall operations. A well-trained team not only avoids pitfalls but ensures a platform’s full potential is realized.
3. Keep Order Guides Up-to-Date
A current order guide is key to efficient ordering. Failing to keep order guides up-to-date often results in over-ordering or selecting incorrect products, leading to waste and an unnecessary strain on the budget. Additionally, workers can miss out on new products or overlook potentially valuable items. These mistakes can cause stock-outs at critical moments, disrupt the kitchen’s workflow, and cause disappointing customer experiences.
To avoid these pitfalls, it’s essential to regularly update order guides. Menus evolve as customer preferences and supplier stocks change, and order guides need to reflect these adjustments. A current order guide allows staff to swiftly reorder frequently used items without sorting through endless product catalogs, saving time and improving accuracy. Keeping tabs on supplier contact details and delivery preferences ensures time isn’t wasted checking up on minor details.
Ensuring smooth and consistent ordering reduces the risk of errors, makes it easier to onboard new staff, and helps the restaurant operate more efficiently overall—putting more time (and budget) back into day-to-day operations.
4. Maintain Clear Communication with Distributors
In the quick-service restaurant industry, where timing and precision are everything, a communication breakdown can cost restaurants both time and money. Distributors deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of operators every day. In this environment, mistakes are easy to make—but misunderstandings can lead to delayed deliveries, incorrect orders, or missing items, disrupting the kitchen and impacting customer satisfaction.
Effective communication with distributors is critical for preventing misunderstandings and ensuring timely deliveries. Fortunately, many e-commerce platforms are now equipped with integrated communication tools, such as in-app messaging, voice-to-text, and chat features. These tools centralize every interaction with distributors, maintaining a historical record that helps prevent costly errors. Avoiding back-and-forth confusion ensures timely responses and builds a clear trail of every conversation that future staff can reference if an issue arises. Additionally, establishing specific points of contact for different types of inquiries—whether it’s about order status, delivery concerns, or product quality—helps streamline communication.
Having the right contact ensures that issues are addressed promptly and accurately, reducing delays and speeding up resolution times. Maintaining clear communication with distributors is essential for avoiding costly disruptions and ensuring timely, accurate deliveries. By utilizing integrated communication tools and establishing specific points of contact, both distributors and operators can keep interactions—and operations—running smoothly.
5. Integrate with POS Systems
Failing to integrate e-commerce platforms with POS systems can lead to a host of operational challenges. Synchronizing the two creates a crucial connection between sales ( the front of the house) and inventory (the back of the house). These are important benchmarks for determining menu items and availability, and a lack of visibility on either side can lead to under or overstocking, creating disappointing customer interactions. This becomes a bigger problem as a business grows. Managing separate systems can become increasingly complex, making it difficult to scale efficiently and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction.
Integrating e-commerce platforms with POS systems is essential for keeping inventory levels accurate and up-to-date based on real-time sales. Instead of tedious, error-prone manual data entry, automatic data synchronization eliminates the need for manual updates. This streamlines operations and allows staff to concentrate on delivering exceptional customer service and handling other critical tasks.
Moreover, this integration enhances scalability, ensuring that introducing new products or expanding to additional locations can be managed smoothly. With both systems working together, operators are well-positioned to meet customer demands effectively and maintain operational efficiency at scale.
Embrace These Strategies to Unlock Success
In a rapidly evolving industry, maximizing the capabilities that online order management systems can bring is not just a smart move—it’s essential for long-term success. By understanding platform features, thoroughly training staff, updating order guides, maintaining clear communication with distributors, and integrating with POS systems, operators can transform operational challenges into opportunities for efficiency and growth.
Don’t settle for basic functionality; leverage these tools to their fullest potential to streamline processes, reduce errors, and optimize performance across the board. The quick-service industry will continue to change rapidly, and those who fully leverage these systems will be best equipped to scale, adapt, and lead the way.
Mani Kulasooriya is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cut+Dry, a unified platform transforming food commerce by making it more efficient, profitable, and sustainable. With decades of industry expertise, Mani and his team previously led Sysco’s digital transformation before creating Cut+Dry to modernize food service distribution through technology.
