Top 4 Challenges Hospitality Wants Solved

If you had a magic wand to fix one issue facing the restaurant industry what would it be and why?

TURNOVER

“We need to create job design and cultures that treat people with respect and give them hope for a better life. We have parents raising families working as hourly workers. It is not enough to raise a family having one job. Many have two or three, just to make
ends meet.” 

– Fred LeFranc, President & CEO, Results Thru Strategy

MEETING CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS

“When I was a newly minted MBA there was a concept called Management By Wandering Around (MBWA). Management was directed to leave their office and interact with front-line personnel for a significant portion of their workweek. The idea was for management to get out of their heads and see what impact their decisions were having on day-to-day operations that directly touched customers. It was incumbent upon the front-line employees to be frank in their assessments and responses to management’s questions, and it was incumbent upon management to hear and respond appropriately. I think it is high time management got back in the habit of experiencing first-hand how customers are being treated, and fix the problems you find.” 

– Lee Holman, Lead Retail Analyst, IHL Consulting

INTEGRATION

“Business requirements continue to drive specialized and increasingly complex systems. To build these systems, integrating applications is more a necessity now than it was 20 years ago. Some aspects of integration have become better understood. Standards have been developed, XML and JSON are widely used, APIs are often open and accessible, but complexity remains. While APIs are often open, they do not always follow industry standard specifications. Where standards have been used, they are often implemented differently with many extensions added. This variability increases the time and cost required for integrations. Certification programs, while costly, are not profit centers but cost recovery centers. The cost of complexity creates little to no value in the hospitality industry. HTNG has recently formed a new workgroup to take a fresh look at why integrations are still so difficult. We are happy that we made it better, but are committed to making it effortless.” 

– Michael Blake, CEO, HTNG

UNIVERSAL DATA EXCHANGE 

“The integration of our various systems has been, currently is and will continue to be an expensive and challenging endeavor. APIs and web services are steps in the right direction, but the maturity, capability and cost of such integrations will continue to provide challenges. Universal standards in this area would have long-lasting benefits and would greatly influence and increase the adoption of SaaS solutions as they could quickly, easily and accurately be implemented with legacy on-premise and other SaaS solutions.” 

– Ted Stathakis, Data Technology Consultant, Two Coast Technology