High street food outlet EAT has the mission statement of serving “good, fresh, uncomplicated food” and it wanted an ICT system that would reflect that ethos.
According to Cesar Ramanauskas, systems engineer at EAT:
To that end, the firm has adopted Google Apps online collaboration and communication suite to make it easier for its 1,700 employees to communicate and collaborate across its 100 stores and thereby – it hopes – improve the level of service it can offer to customers.
EAT has shown itself as something of a hi-tech pioneer in the past offering customers an integrated Chip & PIN contactless payment solution as well as providing free Wi-Fi, a Twitter feed and iPhone app. The firm previously used an on-premise system, Novell GroupWise to support collaboration among staff and managers, but this brought with it a problematic upgrade process. Ramanauskas recalls:
That “something better” was quickly determined to be Cloud-based in nature. Ramanauskas argues:
EAT’s staff now uses features within the Google Apps suite, including: Google Talk to instant message one another when they run out of stock of a popular sandwich, for instance. This can then be transported from a nearby store. This saves them from ringing the store manager, which would take valuable time, particularly during busy lunchtime shifts. Google Forms, which provides a simple way for head office to survey shop managers to capture issues and ideas on improving the business.
There are also cost savings to be made, of course adds Ramanauskas:
The firm has replaced the BlackBerry Enterprise servers the firm previously used to support BlackBerry smartphones to move onto HTC Android smartphones which have tools like Gmail and Google calendar built in and offers the latest corporate and management apps. This means that managers can access documents and order whilst on the move, giving them the ability to oversee a number of restaurants whilst based at just one.
