The Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast brought to you by Custom Business Solutions
The Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast brought to you by Custom Business Solutions
Maximizing Kitchen Efficiency with QSR Automations' Brian Wayne
In this episode of the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, Jeremy Julian is joined by Brian Wayne, VP of Customer Success at QSR Automations. They discuss how QSR Automations' technology solutions, such as the ConnectSmart kitchen display system and front desk software, enhance kitchen efficiency and guest experience. Brian shares insights into his journey with QSR Automations, the evolution of their products, and the importance of data in improving restaurant operations. The conversation highlights the benefits of transitioning from kitchen printing to more sophisticated kitchen management systems, including improved food quality, reduced noise, and better guest communication. Brian also touches on the significance of real-time data, partnerships, and predictive analytics in the future of restaurant technology.
00:00 QSR Automations
00:39 Introduction and Guest Introduction
01:03 Brian's Journey with QSR Automations
02:55 What is QSR Automations?
05:25 The Evolution of Kitchen Display Systems
12:03 Real-Time Data and Guest Communication
19:30 Front Desk Software and Integration
26:11 The Future of Restaurant Technology
29:48 Touchscreens vs. Bump Bars in Kitchens
32:37 Conclusion and How to Engage with QSR
This is the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. Helping you run your restaurant better.
Jeremy Julian:In today's episode, we are joined by Brian Wayne from QSR automations, Brian and I have known each other for quite some time. And if you're not familiar with QSR and what it can do to automate your kitchen, You really need to listen to this episode. He, and I go through all of the different ways that they deploy the software to make kitchens super efficient using technology and integrations to your existing point of sale solutions. If you don't know me, my name is Jeremy Julian. I am the chief revenue officer for custom business solutions. We sell the NorthStar up on a cell product that focuses on automating multiunit restaurant technology. Check us www.Cbsnorthstar.com. Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us. The guest today is, actually somebody I've known for quite some time and Brian and I were talking a little bit pre show. I'm going to let him introduce himself, but, I am certain many of our listeners out there are going to know Brian's organization, who he's worked for quite some time as well. But Brian, why don't you introduce yourself? Then we can talk a little bit about what you get to do for a living.
Brian Wayne:Sure. my name is Brian Wayne. I'm the VP of customer success at QSR automations. I just celebrated my 20th year anniversary here, which was pretty, pretty overwhelming to be honest. I actually, Started with QSR. QSR was founded in 1996, and I started with QSR when I was in high school. so I truly am, a lifer. when Lee founded the business, he needed somebody to build, the hardware, because it was all custom hardware, video controllers, and bump bars. And, he, he brought me on, I would come after school and I would sit at a card table and, had a Phillips head screwdriver, a box of screws and some rubber feet and would assemble all the bump bars and, epic video controllers back then. so it was pretty cool. I, so that's how I got to know him and then really stayed in touch with them throughout college. I interned a little bit and then he hired me on full time. and I've had the opportunity to do a little bit of everything throughout my years here, which is really how I learned the product. I started in support and in QA and, really got a handle on the product and then spent the majority of my time here in, in kind of the implementation world. Jeremy, I look back, I found, through the archives. I had come out in 2006, it looked like to, to train your team. on how to use our products and, so I've known you guys for a really long time. And it seems half the people I train there are now IT execs, on the West Coast. So it's a testament to you guys for how many, how many people have come through the CBS
Jeremy Julian:I love it. and it's one of the things that we're most proud of on the CBS side is just how many employees and team members we've gotten, to different positions. The cool part for both of us is that, that, many of them are using your guys products, which is even more, more awesome from that perspective. So yeah. for those that are living under a rock and don't know what this business is, that's been that, what is QSR automations? Cause I know a lot of our listeners are going to know, but for those that don't, aren't aware of it, you talked about epic boxes. I'm I like brought back, PTSD of some of those old boxes coming back out of the greasy kitchens and having to repair the darn things. But, but Brian, why don't you, why don't you go through what's What is the flagship product that you guys started with so many years ago and in high school, what you were building out, what was it doing and how was it such a special, special product that again, we've been partnering with you guys, close to 20 years now,
Brian Wayne:Yeah, so it's, it's at its core. Our core product is a kitchen display system. and in the mid nineties, our founder was actually a contract developer for KFC here in Louisville, which is where we're based. And he, KFC needed a solution for, digital, kitchen in their restaurants to produce the food. so we set out to create that solution for him and built it. For kfc and from there it exploded, we got a few table service restaurants early on brinker chili's being one of the big kind of first adopters and then it just took off from there Several years later. we modernized the platform, which is what it is today called connect smart so connect smart now, you know is the kitchen product, but then we've also got You front of house, table management, reservations, waitlist management, product called Connect Smart Host, recipe solution, off premise, management solution, analytics, and all the other little bits and pieces. but, It, throughout the kind of early 2000s, we really grew quite a bit and started landing a lot of enterprise level chains. We really made our name in the table service space, which is a little bit ironic with our name. a lot of people think we're just, for quick service restaurants, but we expanded to, there were a few. Big brands like Brinker, Cheesecake Factory was another big one where, a lot of people wanted to emulate what they were doing. And, so we grew out to, I think today we're in about 20 out of the top 25 table service restaurant, change using our product. And, we've made our way into fast, casual, we've got a lot of quick service and then all other areas to, cruise ships, senior living.
Jeremy Julian:Yeah.
Brian Wayne:Anyway with a kitchen really can use it. So it's opened the door to sell to all sorts of types of
Jeremy Julian:and I love that. Cause again, we were part of some of those early conversations and a lot of that table service world. And so for those that I guess paint a picture, Going back to a lot of kitchen display systems back in the early days, even your guys's onset with KFC was that fast food drive through. We got to get the food from the front counter to the back and get it in and out of the kitchen. It replaced printers, but it wasn't, there wasn't a whole lot of intelligence to it. And I don't want to speak. poorly about that. But quite frankly, in fast food, it's fast. It's you got to be in and out. It's fast. The food is sitting there waiting. Most times it's being assembled, put no bag, put no box and then hand it out to a guest. So the complexity of the software side of it was a lot less difficult. Then you get into table service and you've got things like timing. You've got different stations, different kitchen layouts, our listeners through. Cause I still talk today to, operators that are, I just need to go back to tickets. I don't need to deal with all of this stuff and talk, talk me through what even that process looks like, Brian, for one of those brands that's coming off of tickets or is not familiar with how much a KDS can do for them and how. Quite frankly, I remember early on, and I, sorry for the story, but I was meeting with one of the Brinker people and they're like, it was 180 degrees different from kitchen printing to going to KDS when they first rolled out your guys solution, because the world literally changed the efficiency within the kitchen, the noise level within the kitchen, the accuracy within the kitchen. But walk me through what it looks like for one of those brands that might be on kitchen printing, that is not aware of this and has never worked in a kitchen. That's got. A fully orchestrated KDS solution, because I think it's this picture that I think it needs to be told because I think everybody has to be there today in order to compete.
Brian Wayne:Yeah, you nailed a lot of the, you nailed a lot of my key points on the head there, Jeremy, but, it's essentially. It's the fact that, when I've done these implementations throughout the years, it's always amazing when they flip that switch on the first time. And there's always some nervousness in the kitchen. it's people who have relied on these printed chips and they know their way, they know how to run their kitchen. And then they realize how everything changes, how much easier it is, how many, less mistakes are being made, how much less food waste and the, and then the ticket times just naturally. And a lot of that, like you said, is, and especially in a table service kitchen is through that orchestration, it's the cook time, sequencing and it's the coursing and it's the activity levels that you can have when there's less, cooks on. So it really, it's the combination of all those things. And the other 1 that you mentioned, which is 100 percent accurate is the is how quiet it is. Yeah, it's people are always in all I'm not having to scream across the kitchen anymore. the screen is just telling me what to make, when to make it. And then, the other huge benefit, too, that people don't always think about right off the bat is the data behind it. and, back 15 years ago, the data was a nice thing to pump into your BI tool and run reports and see things after the fact. And now it's become more that real time, benefit that a lot of people aren't thinking about, but it's where off premise comes into play and, how do I, communicate when my order's ready to a guest through my app or through an SMS message or how do I give a more accurate quote time back to the guest and all those types of things,
Jeremy Julian:Yeah. I'd love to talk through even kitchen timing, because I think there's, again, this misnomer when you're on printing. Most systems nowadays, do have some level of timing, but they don't necessarily have the ability to have, a well done steak go in now and then a chicken Caesar salad go in 12 minutes after the well done steak went in. Talk me through even what does that look like, Brian, when you guys are implementing this? Cause again, most people don't have the level of sophistication that Cheesecake Factory does for our international listeners. They do some of the highest volume of a casual dining chain. they actually do statistically have the highest volume of a casual dining chain and most of their kitchens, because they happen to be a mutual client of ours, as well as, as well as QSR, they will, they have 12 to 15 screenings, all running touchscreens in their environment to be able to orchestrate this kitchen that has thousands of items coming out of it every day. But talk me through even what does that look like for somebody that's used to the. The fast food, everything just goes to the screens and now it's the kitchen managing it versus the technology.
Brian Wayne:yeah. So there's, there's kind of two layers to it in our system. One is what we call the coursing, and we've got intelligent coursing built in to where you can literally send in apps, salads, entrees, all at the same time, and we can paste that out depending on when it needs to hit. But then what within each course. Each item, you can program in a projected cook time of that item, and based on those cook times, it's going to hold the next item in line, just to make sure with the goal being all the food hits the window at the same time so it can be run out, and we capture all that, that data behind the scenes so you can go and audit yourself after the fact to see, is this cook time accurate, why is food sitting in the window so long? Or why is this item dragging? So maybe I shouldn't, this item is taking too long to make. So maybe I should, not include it in my menu going forward, all those types of things. But it's, it's a process we take our customers through. Or we're very, consultative in terms of when we're onboarding somebody new and you're probably, I think you guys share a lot of the same, same ideology, but we're going to get Integrated into your business, make sure, do full operational reviews, meet with ops, meet with the restaurant, make sure we understand how the business works. And then this solution is, configurable and it's due to all the customization over, over the 20 something years that we've had it out there that it's got. everything in it that you can imagine. It's funny. Sometimes I've been at restaurants where I'm training somebody new and they say, Oh, we use this solution that was, like this at my old job. And I said, where'd you work? And it was one of our customers. I'm like, no, that was the same solution. It just looks completely different. Cause they want it to work differently. So it's, it's one of those, and it's thanks to all those customers that with those 20 of the top 25 chains that I just talked about, everyone had slightly different requirements. We made a name for ourselves by continuing to build upon and adapt the product so that it would work. if Cheesecake Factory thinks this is a good idea and it's probably going to work somewhere else too. And if Brinker thinks this is a good idea, then somebody else is probably going to think
Jeremy Julian:Yeah, no, I love that. And that's part of why we've had such a long standing partnership with you guys is because of that. you said something in your intro about the product, about real time data. One of the things that I find most valuable when you're running tickets, there's always this tension between the front of the house and the back of the house. When has my food going to get out for my guests and the, and the kitchen At times is running behind and the kitchen staff at times is not running behind when it's tickets. There's no real arbiter Of who wins who's right who's wrong? But when you've got a system like qsr You can see when something is supposed to take nine minutes and it's at 12 or 14 minutes for that miso salmon You can't see it You can see it. And now as a manager, as somebody that's on the expo side of the line, I can start to see those things and figure out, is this guy running behind? Is he, is there something wrong? Is the station not set up properly? Talk me through how some of those real time things benefit both the guests and the staff communication and really the guest experience at the end of the day. And now a word from one of our sponsors. Every restaurant operator understands the chaos of a Restaurant kitchen during the meal rush restaurant technologies, oil, total oil management solutions, and end to end automated oil management system that delivers filters, monitors, and recycles your cooking oil, taking the dirtiest jobs out of your kitchen and letting your employees focus on more important tasks. Control the kitchen chaos with restaurant technologies and make your kitchen safer. No upfront costs to learn more, check out rti inc. com or call 888 796 4997. Growing your business can mean big time logistical questions like, how am I going to keep up with all these local deliveries? Let UberDirect offer you a helping hand. With UberDirect, you can take orders on your website, via app, or by phone. Then drivers who are part of the Uber courier network will pick them up from your store and deliver them to your customer's doorsteps. Sounds simple, right? Delivery just got better with UberDirect. Check out uberdirect. com to learn more.
Brian Wayne:Yeah. So the simplest thing we have is, we call it priority and rush times that can be assigned to each item and each order in the screen. it'll go to yellow when it's late and it'll go to red when it's really late. But we also track all the average, times and you can put all sorts of, custom metrics on the headers of your screen that really get any point across that you want. What percentage of orders are going into rush over the last 30 minutes? Or what's my average ticket time? so you can get a pretty good handle and then each order also has a timer on it, obviously, so you can see, where, how late you're running. we've got some customers that will dedicate an entire screen to just dashboard metrics so that they can just glance up at any point in time and see. And, a point that I made earlier is the, That data now is so much more important because it's important for leaving the walls of the restaurant. Like we, we, we've always been sitting on this goldmine of data, we believe the kitchen is really the engine room of the restaurant, all these different channels and delivery and all these providers that are pumping orders in. We've got all of that data, and we know how many orders are being prepared through the kitchen at any given time, and if you're running late. and we never really knew how to best get that back out. We've got APIs, we've got webhooks, but we haven't really, unlocked how do we make this available so that everyone, we've got all the data you need. but we've made some strides. We shifted a little bit a few years ago in the partnerships, a little bit more. we built a partnership with Olo where now customers using both Olo and, ConnectSmart can get more accurate Olo quotes because they're taking into consideration all the orders, not just Olo orders, but even dine in orders or orders from other channels. we did a partnership. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the team at Curbit, but that's another one, yeah, that we did. We're. they've taken the data and they're handling all the guest communication side. they're feeding the guests more accurate, recalibrated quote times. when your takeout food is going to be ready and they're communicating with SMS back and forth to the guests. and another one was a fly by that we did. so fly by is more location awareness and using that data and feeding that in. So we we were like, it was a struggle to try and find a solution that everyone would adopt. So it was like, why don't we Go more of the partnership route, to feed people back. And then we've got customers that do it all themselves. They'll just take the data
Jeremy Julian:Yeah, we ironically built, built our own machine learning logarithm, took data from cheesecake and some other clients to get accurate quote times back, not necessarily compete with LO, but really to prove out the model that says the right quote times are going to increase basket size. Cause most, quoting tools are very linear. I have five orders in the kitchen. It's a 30 minute wait time. I have six orders. It's 35 minutes. Whereas if I'm just getting a chicken Caesar salad and a slice of cheesecake, it might be eight minutes worth of a cook time. Cause that's a much quicker cook time than a well done New York strip and a jambalaya pasta. that, take a lot longer to prepare. one of the other things, Brian, that I like to remind people of when we're talking about QSR is food quality. When you're running kitchen printing or you're running everything going to the kitchen at the same time, and we've got that example and again I've used the example of the chicken caesar salad and the well done New York, the well done New York is going to take 14 to 16 minutes to cook just for sake of argument, and the chicken caesar might take 6 minutes to cook. That 10 minute window, if it's going with printing or everything goes to the kitchen at the same time, that salad is going to be 10 minutes older than the New York strip that's getting put into the box or getting put onto the plate, which ultimately impacts food quality. Talk to me a little bit about how you guys even. Work with clients to organize that kitchen to make sure that all of the food the hot food comes out of the window Hot the cold food comes out of the window cold and everything stays At the right temperature because that can I mean I was just somewhere last week Not using qsr and somebody would complain that their food was cold and somebody else's Plate was burning hot because they probably made the food, and it wasn't sitting under the hot lamp, the heat lamp, and it probably shouldn't have been sitting under the heat lamp because they're not using automation that will help make these things better. So can you talk us through how you would even organize that and why, what's the business impact ultimately to the guests and to the brand?
Brian Wayne:Yeah, it's all about that sequencing, right? We always say the same with hot food, hot, cold food, cold, you. if your timing is accurate and we've got other kind of features built in, we have a feature that says, wait until the longest item is started, you acknowledge it, you started cooking it in our system and then trigger the delay routing from there. So if you're way behind on that station, then, it keeps everything in sequence. It pulls everything back a little bit. there's, so there's things like that kind of keep, keep that food hitting the window at the same time. And we've got other features too, where. it, zone feature that we have where you can push certain food into certain spots in the window to help with the expediting of the food, but it's all about it. It's funny to it again, 10 years ago. Food quality was the only goal, and now it's this combination of food quality and accuracy, with the takeout, where it's, you have to hit both of those things, it's, the food quality is of utmost importance, especially for dine in, but it almost shifts a little bit, so the order accuracy has gotten really aligned, alight. shown on it with, with the, takeout. And that's where, we see people doing, the sticky printing, which I'm sure you see a lot of as well with late labeling each item. And, you can use our system as a checklist to go one by one as you check each one off and it prints a label out to make sure you have the right thing. but yeah, it's, the food quality is just an enormous benefit. There's no
Jeremy Julian:Yeah, I love that. one last piece before we jump into kind of why some of the other products that you guys have built on. Cause I think it's a really cool story when we talk about front desk, but you talked about guest communication and one of my favorite features, especially for things like fast casual, we've all worked at, we've all eaten at a fast casual restaurant 10 years ago, 15 years ago, we'd have a fast casual restaurant. They'd be either calling out numbers, number 52, your order's ready. You got to go to the counter and got to go get it. Or they give you these pagers that were really expensive and they were hard to maintain and they were hard to run food to you. You guys came up with some pretty cool stuff that I think is something worth talking through, which is the ability to communicate with that guests when food is ready and where to go and have a guest engagement because you guys know when the food is done. It's hitting the expo at the point of sale. They only know when it got to the kitchen, you guys know when the food is prepared and it's either boxed up. If it's in a takeout scenario or it's in the dining room, and I'm grabbing it from the window. You guys know those things in this fast, casual fast food environment. Talk me through how that came about and what that looks like. Cause I think it's, it's so underutilized and I think more and more people should be thinking about it because I think it creates a fantastic guest experience.
Brian Wayne:Yeah, so it started, we built, we built within our table management platform years ago, the ability to, notify the guests via SMS. Like you said, it used to just be those pagers. And then once the SMS kind of got popular, we jumped onto that. And, we built two way SMS and all different triggers that you can send to the guests when their table's ready, when they've been added to the wait list, when they're about to be seated, reservation confirmation. We built the platform that enabled those SMSs to get sent. And then when takeout started to boom a little bit more, it was a no brainer to extend that to those takeout orders. And all we needed was the phone number. and a lot of, we've got 70 plus point of sale integrations and everybody sends us information slightly differently. And there was a little bit of a challenge there, and how do we get that phone number so we know who to send that order ready SMS to, and we actually built in a rules engine into the software that says, hey, just send us the phone number as a menu item if you don't, if you're not going to send it to us in the phone number field, which some of these older interfaces couldn't. we built in the plumbing to allow it to happen. and then, yeah, from there it was, we can send you a, we can send you a message when the order is confirmed. If you want, we can send you a message when the order is ready. the other interesting one too, that we've seen a lot, a lot of adoption and, Dave's hot chicken is a up and coming brand that just, is starting to roll out with us. they added an order ready screen as well. For the lobby. So we're seeing more and more of that where people will mount a big TV, essentially. And have the information up there, you first only would see that in fast food But you were starting to see it with casual fast casual dining even at takeout
Jeremy Julian:I think at the end of the day, us as guests, I've had multiple people on the show in the past as guests, we have certain expectations and unfortunately, people like Amazon ruin those expectations for us because they communicate all throughout the way. I got something delivered today and it's there's 11 stops that you're on the 10th stop. You're on the night stuff. Like they're giving us that data. And unfortunately, so many restaurants, you hope and pray that it got to the restaurant and you hope and pray that the food gets to you, whether that's at DoorDash or it's in takeout. and sometimes you have a lot of, guest experience problems. And so being able to real time communicate with the guests, what's going on is huge. And you talked about it, Brian, on the front desk side, front desk is amazing. I love what you guys do there for those brands that, that have a wait list. and again, you guys have a lot of different features there. Cause one of the things that, I always say about QSRs is if it can be done in the kitchen, likely QSR Automations is going to be able to do it. I did get stumped yesterday and I got a problem for you to solve, but, different conversation, not for the podcast, but, that all being said, talk me through, what is the front desk software? Why did it get created? You talked a little bit about kind of some of the advantages of communicating with people, but what is it and why does it exist?
Brian Wayne:Yeah, so it was it just was an extension of you know we had the kitchen product and it was a lot of as we had grown into the table service world It seemed like there were a lot of restaurants that You Needed a better solution for their front desk. There were a lot of honestly that were still using pen and paper. Some of them were using some solutions that were either outdated or going into life. And so we saw that there was a need for it. And we focused, in a few different areas. One was the actual. Table management side of things. So server rotation and, managing the status of the tables. So you, where each table is and its life cycle. The waitlist management was another big one. we were pretty early to add, online waitlisting. so we had that in for years and years, and that's become even more and more popular. you can see, we've got an integration with Google now where a lot of restaurants, you can just go right from the Google page to add your name. and then we added reservations in as well. we intentionally stayed out, of the, B2C, OpenTable type thing. We integrate to OpenTable, we integrate to Google, but we're just focused on, the operational side of managing your tables, your wait lists, and your reservations within your restaurant. That's it. And then the big benefit that we always sell people on is because we have the kitchen, you get some pretty tight integration between the two. So you can see the check detail or what the status, what course they're on, in the kitchen from the front. And then one feature that we added a few years ago is adding host metrics into the back. a big one was open menu count that people love where, From the kitchen screen at the expo or any kitchen screen, I can see how many people have an open menu. So I can predict what's about to hit.
Jeremy Julian:Yeah. and I think, again, having dined at lots of the restaurants that have your guys's stuff with the front desk, it's amazing to watch how much more efficient quote times are guest communication at the counter is as well as even them walking around the dining room to figure out when our tables, they can see where food's at in the kitchen. They can walk to the table, see the check has been dropped and know that likely a four top is going to come up to seat. The next guest, the logarithm tells them, The table likely be ready in eight minutes, but they also can see it with their eyes. They can see it on the system. They can go in and see all of that. You're not taking the point of sale data, but you do see, and it just ultimately creates a better experience when you're going to that counter and you know when you're going to be able to get that data is,
Brian Wayne:those wait times, the wait times is huge. And we put a lot of focus on the different wait times. and that, and then, it's funny, it's like that kind of extended now into, onto the kitchen side with takeout. And I really feel like that's the next, thing to really unlock. people always talk about AI and, it's always broad and no one really has, it just seems like it's just a buzzword. But for me, it's The A. I. In my mind, that would really unlock things for guest experience is all about that predictive analytics. like, how do we better quote off premise? How do we better sequence orders in the kitchen? How do we better quote the guest for wait list? we've had people in the past where. They might not be using the system quite right on the host end. And it's a little bit of garbage in garbage out. And they were able to compensate for walk in guests. You know that the system's telling me it's a 10 minute wait, but I've got a lobby full of people. So I'm going to tell them it's a 45 minute wait. And with all the online, you don't have that luxury anymore. if you're adding yourself to the wait list, the system's got to be right. And if you're doing an off premise order, you're not doing it over the phone. You're doing it online. It's got to be right. To me, it's, that is, is where the magic's gonna happen is that predictive analytics,
Jeremy Julian:and I, that was actually where I was going next. Brian is just this whole idea of, and I tell this story often beginning of the pandemic, there was a brand that I used to go to all the time. And I went to the, to that brand and ultimately because of third party, because of off prem, I had two bad experiences in a row. And to the point that my wife says, I'm never going back there. Don't need to mention brand names, but it was so bad because they had no way to throttle both in dining room guests and third party guests. some of the brands I've talked to both on the show and just at trade shows is they're getting to the point where they've got almost equal third, equal, Off prem as they do on prem. When you walked into a store that was on prem and there was a line, there was a line at the host stand, there was a line at the takeout window, you're at a Dave's hot chicken, you see it, you see the drive thru line, you see the dining room, you're like, Oh, I'm probably going to wait. There's four people in front of me. I'm probably going to wait 10 minutes before I get to order. With third party, with first party online ordering with Olo orders, you have no idea what's going on in the kitchen until you get to that place. Talk me through where you think that's going. You say that's really where the future of it is. Talk me through why you think that's so critical? Because again, Domino's created the Domino's pizza tracker. Amazon's got this idea, but everybody's playing catch up to the, those same brands. And as they're trying to expand their on. On premise and off premise revenue sources. They have to deliver a, at least as good as a guest experience, if not a better at guest experience. And the only way to do that is through systems.
Brian Wayne:yeah, the stakes are so much higher with the, with the off premise and, it's balancing the load. It's, capacity management, you mentioned your example. I remember, the first Mother's Day after, after kind of restaurants had, the COVID hit the first Mother's Day. And mother's day has always been for these table service restaurants a super busy day But they were only limited by how many people could fit in the restaurant and it was like it was chaos for a few brands because they just left their online ordering totally open ended And people were ordering way more than the kitchen could handle so it's it really is now that we've got The data, we understand how much, how capacity, how much capacity we can handle if a certain number of orders are coming in and a certain pace, how much that's going to affect the ticket times. It's just a matter of, it's just a matter of unlocking that to really, figure out where that magic
Jeremy Julian:Love it. I'm going to pivot real quick to something that, that we fundamentally have believed before we wrap up ranks, we're getting close to time. we've had this belief at CBS and I'd love at least your opinion on it. And then what's the real life examples of it. Educating a. Person in the kitchen to use a touchscreen versus using a traditional bump bar is a much easier training process historically. And I know that it was always met with a lot of resistance in the beginning and we CBS, and again, I'm sure there was lots of other people that had done that, but initially when we first started taking on our partnership with you guys, it was bump bar, an Epic unit. We talked about the little mini PCs, and I'll, LCD screen. Probably it wasn't even LED back then. It was LCD screens, maybe even CRTs back in the day that had a little computer, a little mini computer behind it. And there was a bump bar that was sitting in the service station and you would have these windows and you'd bump the orders. We fundamentally believe that as the generations continue to change. People are used to touching a touch screen and being able to get into a kitchen and put a touch screen into the environment is an easier way. I just love your philosophy. Talk to me about what your real life experience is because all too often I go into these brands and they're like, we can't put these things in the kitchen and I'm like, let me just tell you how we've done it because we did do it for cheesecake factory, we did do it for BJ's with these touchscreens in these really greasy environments. And I take some of the hardware manufacturers into these places and they're like, This is where you're putting this stuff. I'm like, yeah, but when you design it properly, you get great software that's resilient, it works really great. So I'd love to at least educate our listeners as to, it's not just a bump bar and a screen that's, 12 feet in the air, it can be in their workspace if they want it to be.
Brian Wayne:Yeah, it's, it, I would say there's been a shift to where, touchscreens have been a little bit more widely adopted. Cheesecake was ahead of the game, to be honest, years and years ago when they first did that. And it was way more, bump bar. Back then, I think it's shifted a little bit. All in ones have become a little bit, easier to source and cheaper, and you've got POE all in ones now. So there's a lot of people that go that route. We still do have people that use kind of the PCAP touchscreen with the device. there are still people that just swear by, And a lot of times it's the position behind the line, where they'll still swear by the bump bar where it's easier for them to just mount a bump bar that's easier to reach that the screen can be further up out of the way where they don't have to reach it. we do pretty much exclusively see touchscreen at the expo side now because there's so much more, actions that take place that it's just, it's easier to use. but yeah, it's, it's, whether you go, either way you go, you can't go, you really can't go wrong. And the hardware is surprisingly, resilient. You, you mentioned those epic boxes. I was actually at Brinker a year or two ago. In their corporate office, and they still had one of the old, I think it was probably built in the early 2000s, and it was still running in their lab. I
Jeremy Julian:That's crazy. I was going through the warehouse in our Dallas office last week. And I found one, I was like, Oh, I haven't seen one of these in a long time. It was not running. not that it wouldn't have run, but it was just, it was sitting in a pile. Brian, how do people learn more? What does it engagement with QSR look like? I know again, we're partners and I'm not saying this to try and pitch. Who we are, there's partners out there that you guys sell through. I know you guys do some direct. So if they want to engage, they want to learn more. Where would you direct people to go? What is that engagement going to look like for an owner that's out there going? I need this kitchen stuff. Let's make it happen.
Brian Wayne:So as you mentioned, we, we have direct, sales and we also have a strong reseller channel like you guys. but we, the easiest way to get ahold of us is just through our website, www. qsranimations. com. we're also represented on all the socials. So we post a lot on LinkedIn. You can search for QSR automations on LinkedIn as well. and if you reach out to us, if you're not sure, we can answer all those questions, connect you with a reseller if you're a single site unit or, no matter what size you are, we can help you
Jeremy Julian:Brian. It's been great to reconnect, talk about some of the, some of the innovations, man, you've gotten to see lots of it, so it's cool to, Kind of talk back about where it was and where it's at now. And, I would implore anybody that's out there, if you haven't at least looked into kitchen video and having KDS screens in there, it is truly a game changer. And I'm not saying that just cause Brian's on the phone. I w I was just telling him I was just at a customer or a potential customer yesterday, telling them you're silly if you don't consider this. thank you for coming on. Thank you guys for what you do. Thank you guys for continuing to innovate. It's so awesome to watch you guys literally listen to the voice of the customer and try and drive that, drive that through. And so thanks for hanging out and make it a great day.
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