Today, Food Plus S.A. operates 15 KFC restaurants in Athens and Thessaloniki and plans to open more stores in the Attica region and selected cities.
Business case
In previous years, Food Plus S.A. used an older version of LS Retail software to manage their KFC restaurants and was very satisfied. The company decided in 2023 to upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and LS Central to take advantage of the latest functionality. They had two objectives: to create a better customer experience and to speed up the ordering process with effective kitchen management and self-service technology.
The solution
Food Plus deemed LS Central for restaurants, LS Retail’s end-to-end restaurant software, as the right software solution for their company. LS Central extends Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP, with all the functionality restaurants need to manage their business in one platform, from tableside ordering to inventory, to kitchen management, to loyalty, and more.
Food Plus S.A. asked Ergologic, a local LS Retail partner, and the strategic IT partner of Food Plus S.A. for many years, to run the implementation. “Ergologic understood our company needs and helped us achieve seamless expansion of our activities,” says Giannis Bisdas, IT Manager at Food Plus. “After we evaluated local solutions, we realized all the advantages and technological benefits offered by Business Central and LS Central.”
Benefits
Since they moved to LS Central for restaurants, Food Plus S.A. have improved their bottom line and customer experience, even during peak hours. With real-time access to all orders, including those from delivery partners, the company is now able to act quickly and make better, informed decisions.
The company now enjoys a swifter checkout process at their registers while the implementation of self-service kiosks has also contributed to faster, and more accurate ordering. By reducing customers’ waiting time, Food Plus S.A. have managed to increase both revenue and customer satisfaction. Other benefits for the company include:
- Managing their inventory effectively. The company can see what their best-selling items are, get alerts when inventory is low, and let the system suggest what to order and in what quantities.
- Viewing and managing all kitchen orders in one place, no matter whether the order was placed at the register or self-service kiosk.
- Making real-time menu or price updates across all touchpoints in just a few taps.
- Having improved communication between the front and back-of-house. The kitchen display system (KDS) communicates orders clearly and in real-time, ensuring the kitchen staff can prepare them accurately and in the right order while giving front-of-house employees more time to spend on customer service.
- Catering to more customers with seamless integration of delivery service providers (DSPs). Orders from food delivery platforms, like Wolt Delivery and efood, are sent directly to the POS like any other order.
- Running comprehensive reports in Power BI that they can apply to specific locations or to the entire business, helping the company to identify trends in sales, optimize production, and reduce recipe costs.
- Creating promotions and offers that foster loyalty. The company can send personalized messages and offers to target groups based on their customer profiles, order history, product ratings, and more.
When Food Plus S.A. realized its entire IT infrastructure was obsolete and incompatible with the newer version of Microsoft Dynamics ERP and LS Retail software, requiring full replacement, it opted for a SaaS (software-as-a-service) deployment of the solution. The costs associated with maintaining, upgrading, and running an on-premise solution were significantly higher than adopting the SaaS model. As the company expands and requires frequent customizations, SaaS ensures that it automatically runs on the latest version of the software at no extra cost. Running the system fully in the cloud offers numerous benefits, including faster implementation times, cost savings, enhanced collaboration, improved security, and robust data loss prevention.
Food Plus S.A. will soon deploy more self-service kiosks in their KFC restaurants. With support from LS Retail and Ergologic, Food Plus S.A. can prepare effectively for their busiest times of day and continue to serve happy customers in all the KFC restaurants in Greece.
