Call to Action

As many restaurant technologists gather at FS/TEC this month, it seems worthwhile to examine the relationship between restaurant operators and technology vendors. It is a sometimes contentious, sometimes satisfying relationship. On both sides, there are occasional calls for redefining the relationship, but it is a difficult dialogue to get started.

In an effort to get both sides talking, Hospitality Technology magazine hosted a session at the Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology conference earlier this year. Entitled: "Call to Action Summit: New Rules for Vendor Engagement," the session brought together a number of operators and vendors in an animated roundtable discussion.

While it would be impossible to reproduce the entire discussion here, we at HT  feel it is extremely important to open up the discussion to a wider audience. Below are excerpts from the comments of panelists: Richard Laciano, director of infrastructure technology for Wendy's; John Doyle, director of IT support for Ruby Tuesday; and George Labelle, director of information systems at Subwayis Independent Purchasing Cooperative. 

Building trust

John Doyle: In a new relationship, trust is the hard thing. We have trusted vendors who weive been working with for years who weire very comfortable with. But, it is hard to establish that trust and feel like youire getting from the vendor a real commitment to a long-term relationship vs. them just being interested in making a sale.

Richard Laciano: Too many times we, as customers, will bring the vendor in and say, "Yea, we want to do this. We want to do that. What are you going to charge us?" Then after we get the price, we change what we ask them to do because there are some other problems we didnit account for. And without giving the vendor anymore money, we want them to pony up to the bar and fix all of those things. The bottom line is that weive got to deal properly with our vendors because if they donit make money, then theyire out of business.

George LaBelle: If any of you have been involved in a technology project, especially a large scale one, you know that somewhere along the line, all of the terms that youive put into the contract and all the SLAs and the metrics are going to go out the window because youire going to hit a situation that none of those address. Itis going to come down to trust. Thereis two ways to establish trust in a new relationship, I feel. The first one is a long courtship period. Anytime we enter into a significant agreement with a technology vendor, we take plenty of time to talk to them, to get to know their staff better and to understand their culture. You canit do that over one dinner. We need to do our homework and go out and get a complete list of customers for the vendor and talk to all of them and get some feedback on the trustworthiness of those vendors. 

Service-level agreements

Labelle: SLAs are extremely complex and there are a lot of gotchais and pitfalls associated with SLAs. So I would advise any operator thatis going out and defining SLAs for the first time, you may want to go out and talk to a consultant about it. Again, no matter how many SLAs you put into a contract, no matter how specific you are with your SLAs, youire going to encounter areas where itis not going to cover certain situations and itis going to come back again to trust.

Laciano: Just as an example of where you can really miss things in SLAs--with Hughes (www.hns.com) I have a 99.5 percent availability SLA and there are financial penalties if they donit make that. That sounds great, but luckily I had some other people on my staff who looked into it. I can have 15 stores down in any month for two weeks each and still make my SLAs. An SLA that sounds good may not be exactly what you need and you may have to tweak it a little. So we added SLAs that dealt with an individual store and itis performance.

Doyle: The flip side of that is not only is it important to have the SLA, itis important to follow up and monitor the SLA and verify that the vendoris actually meeting it. I see all too often that there are great SLAs that are written into contracts, but theyire really not being met and the customeris not forcing the vendor to live up to it.