In 2121, digital transformation has been pushed to the forefront. Do you want to make transformation? How to turn? What kind of enterprises must be transferred? Is it necessary to transfer? Wait a series of questions, I will share them with some simple examples here!

if the development history of the catering industry is roughly divided into four eras, which can be divided into: single restaurant in the 1991s, direct chain with heavy assets in the 11s, franchise chain with weak control in the 11s, and intelligent restaurant in progress, if the first three eras are called 1.1, 2.1 and 3.1 respectively, it is now in the "4" of catering.

The first three eras were divided according to the business model. Why did the 4.1 era take "intelligence" as the protagonist? According to the business model, the "2.1 era" heavy asset model of self-built central kitchen and self-opened shop led to the steady but slow development of the older generation of direct chain catering enterprises. The "3.1 era" is the opposite. Light assets are popular, and there is nothing in the headquarters of catering enterprises. It relies on the franchise model to expand rapidly. Although it develops rapidly, due to poor management and control, it closes stores as quickly. In the "4.1 era", these two models began to merge, and the headquarters often opened stores in partnership with franchisees. At the same time, the headquarters adopted a strong control model for franchisees, which not only achieved the goal of rapid expansion through the franchise model, but also achieved the steady operation of expansion without losing control.

However, how to integrate the light and heavy modes is theoretically possible, but it is not easy in the actual landing process. It is not easy to rely solely on traditional management methods, such as "strengthening management without adding excessive management team and excessive management cost", "maintaining unified management and strategic consistency while rapidly expanding the partnership system" and "seeking new growth points on the basis of ensuring survival". As a result, "digitalization" has been put back on the agenda.

1. The common misunderstanding of "digital transformation of catering enterprises"

Digital transformation may be familiar to many people. Almost all catering enterprises have done it or are doing it because of "going to the system". Is "going to the system" a "digital transformation"?

For catering enterprises, the first idea of "going to the system" is "cash register system", so many catering enterprises equate "digitalization" with "cash register system". More advanced, add a scan code to order food and scan code to pay, it seems that the restaurant has become a "smart restaurant", and the so-called "digital transformation" is almost completed.

equating "catering system" with "cash register system" is a narrow understanding of enterprise informatization.

The informationization of catering includes many aspects. The cashier system is only one of the transaction ports between the store and the customers. Besides, scanning code for ordering food, self-service ordering screen, self-service take-out and integral mall ... all belong to the category of "transaction ports". No matter what kind of "transaction port", it only solves the contact between restaurants and customers and collects the most elementary customer transaction information, or it only realizes "transaction digitalization", but it is far from realizing "management digitalization". Therefore, it is very one-sided to regard "digital transformation" as "cash register system".

so, what if "digital transformation" is understood as "all systems in the world"?

"going to the system" is just a form, not an end. The real purpose of "digital transformation" is to change the transaction, management, accounting, decision-making and other aspects of catering enterprises from "manual intervention" to "system automation" as far as possible by using digital means, so as to avoid all kinds of execution problems caused by human laziness, human error and slow manpower.

as a manager, you may have designed a very good management formulation and process system for the enterprise, but you will soon find that the biggest difficulty in enterprise management is not the establishment of the system, but the implementation of the system. The so-called "decision-making is easy to implement". Why is it difficult to implement? Nothing more than three aspects, the essence of human nature is procrastination, people are prone to make all kinds of mistakes, and people's actions and computing ability are slow. The system is tireless, either 1 or 1, and the speed is fast. Therefore, it is the key to solve the execution by liberating people through the system and improving efficiency. Whether it is ERP or artificial intelligence, whether it is a cash register system or an online mall, in the final analysis, all of them are for this purpose.

As stated in the White Paper of Industry 4.1, the Internet seems to be the improvement of user experience, but in fact the essence of the Internet is "the improvement of efficiency". No matter what kind of system you use, no matter how gorgeous and friendly the interface is, whether it is offline application or O2O, Internet applications are ultimately applications for improving efficiency.

Similarly, the "digital transformation" of catering enterprises does not depend on what kind of system you are on, but on whether you have really improved the efficiency of the enterprise in trading, management and decision-making through the system.

2. what is the sign of "digital transformation"?

for enterprises that are implementing digital transformation, a significant sign of achieving the goal is whether they have achieved "four online", namely, organizational online, business online, ecological online and data online.

11. Organizing online

Organizing online refers to the digitalization of enterprise organizational structure. From the perspective of HR, it is the integration of contract, scheduling, attendance, performance and salary management through the human resource management system, which is the "digital transformation" of HR at the macro level.

from the broad sense of organizational management, it also includes recruitment, training and instant messaging. for example, through enterprise wechat, all the daily application tools of employees are embedded to form a unified employee office desk, which formally eliminates the dispersion of employees' office, and realizes the "digital transformation" of employees from a micro perspective.

12. Business Online

Business Online refers to the digitalization of business, marketing and supply chain, which often refers to the "business center" part of the overall informationization of enterprises.

When it comes to "business in Taiwan", many catering enterprises are still at a loss. Few people can clearly explain what this familiar hot word means. Here I will make a simple metaphor. Everyone should call some 411 after-sales calls, and the receiver is often a sweet customer service lady. But as we all know, the problems you mentioned are not all solved by this customer service girl. In fact, in most cases, this customer service girl is just a contact point between the company and you. Her role is to get customer service requests and questions from you, but most of the problems are actually handled by the business teams behind her. After the processing is completed, she will give you feedback.

Looking back at the informationization of catering, all the trading systems (such as POS, code-scanning ordering, take-away applet, etc.) are equivalent to this customer service lady, and their interfaces are friendly and beautiful, just like the sweet voice of the customer service lady, giving customers a wonderful experience. However, users' demands can not be directly solved by these transaction terminals. Customers can't see the "back end", and there is a huge business processing system, which is specially used for order processing, marketing calculation, delivery, kitchen instructions, financial write-off, exception handling, etc. This huge business processing system is what people often say as "business middle desk", and every sweet-sounding customer service lady is equivalent to a type of "front desk" (for example, The "front desk" can be varied, just as every miss customer service has her own unique voice and style, while the "business middle desk" is uniform, processing all the instructions collected by the "front desk" in a unified way, and then feeding them back to the "front desk" after processing, which will feed them back to customers.

before the establishment of the "business middle desk", all the "front desks" either "take orders by themselves and handle them by themselves" could not give customers a good experience because of the uneven level of each front desk; Either "each front desk has its own separate background", which leads to the separation between systems and forms an "information island". Therefore, in the increasingly complex informationization of catering enterprises today, it is particularly important to establish a "business center". To some extent, the "digital transformation" of catering enterprises also represents the "center-based" of catering enterprise information systems.

among all the business platforms, there are three key platforms, namely, business platform, marketing platform and supply chain platform, which realize "unified management of chain business, unified management of member marketing and unified management of supply chain" respectively. The most important result of the establishment of the middle desk in various services is to realize "the front end is light and diverse, and the back end is heavy and unified" Each transaction type of catering enterprises can have its own transaction front end, but the diversity of the front end will not cause the back-end management to be isolated.

13. Ecology Online

"Ecology" was originally an environmental vocabulary, which refers to the "upstream and downstream relationship" of the food chain. In industry, all commercial activities have both supply and demand sides, and "ecology" refers to the "upstream and downstream relationship" with heavy balance between supply and demand. Eco-online of catering enterprises mainly refers to the upstream and downstream relationship between catering enterprises and C-end consumers and B-end merchants through trading platforms including self-operated take-out platforms, new retail malls and supply chain procurement.

for consumers, apart from in-store consumption, out-of-store consumption is most likely to take-away behavior and retail behavior, which is often referred to as "home service" in the Internet field. Through the self-operated take-out platform and retail mall formed by small programs, customers can break through the traditional "people-goods yard" restriction of in-store consumption, so merchants can provide customers with the ability to "shop at home and spend at any time".

in addition to consumers, another important downstream of catering enterprises is their own customers or franchise stores. They buy goods from headquarters, then process them into dishes from stores and sell them to customers. From the perspective of supply chain, the income of headquarters comes from "trunk logistics", the income of regional warehouses comes from "branch logistics", and the income of stores comes from "the last mile", which connects headquarters, regions and stores in series into a supply chain, and then connects consumers through "store-to-store business" and "home-to-home business" of stores to complete final consumption, forming a complete upstream and downstream ecological chain of catering enterprises.

14. Data online

Customers can be reached through the transaction end, business operations and processing can be realized through the business center, and upstream and downstream connections can be completed through ecology. In these processes, a large amount of data will be generated, which are important assets of enterprises, but few enterprises can make full use of them, and more still make some statistical reports from the financial level, which is tantamount to a huge waste of assets.

In fact, most catering enterprises are not unwilling to use these data, but don't know how to use them. Indeed, these data can not become meaningful through the simple formula of "Excel" that people are familiar with, but more importantly, through the "data model", these scattered data stars are more valuable data for business decisions.

so what is a "data model"? The data model is similar to a frame. If you put the scattered data you can't understand into the frame, you can output the data results you can understand according to the frame. For example, you have several G's business data in your hand, and you have no time and can't look at the details of each transaction, but you want to be able to guide "which three dishes have the highest sales volume in the top five regions with the best turnover", which is a model. When this model is implemented in the system, you can import several G business data into the model, and the model can immediately tell you the desired results, which is the meaning of "data online".

For data models, the system must be "customizable" and "easy to customize". As can be seen from the above examples, people have different needs for data analysis, so no matter how many models are involved in the system in advance, it is not enough. The most important thing is to let users make models according to their own wishes, so the data system must have the ability of model customization. In addition, user-defined models often require users to have certain data analysis ability, which means that users should "have ideas" themselves. But for users, the requirements are higher, so mature data systems often have the ability of "agile modeling", which reduces the requirements for users as much as possible and makes it easy for users to model in the system.

when catering enterprises realize "data online", they can truly realize the integrated closed loop from business to data, and reach the maximum value of enterprise informatization.

the "four online" mentioned above can be regarded as the symbol of catering enterprises' digital transformation. You should have understood that the so-called "digital system" is not "on the system", but the effect of enterprise management improvement and data closed loop through "on the system". Therefore, the system is only a "tool", and complete overall planning and step-by-step implementation are the key to the success of digital transformation.

when the catering enterprise completes the "digital transformation", all information systems in the enterprise will form an organic whole, and the information islands will be eliminated, and there is a strong room for expansion and upgrading. Depending on the whole information system, enterprises will improve their operational efficiency, make them agile and flexible, and thus enhance their flexibility and risk resistance. This is the reason why the catering industry reconsiders the "digital transformation" in this post-epidemic period.