Point of Sale

CASE STUDIES: Café & Deli

La Jolla Café Shop
Client: La Jolla Café – La Jolla
Establishment Type: Café and Bistro style Deli
Date of Study: October 2004

The Operation
A high volume, upscale cafe and restaurant in La Jolla, CA. It staffs over 20 employees and operates from 6am to 12am daily.

It has an extensive menu of deserts, and coffee drinks. It also serves sandwiches, entrees, salads and breakfast, with a buffet on the weekends. Its menu also includes happy hour with a beer and wine list. They have over 600 items on their menu not including a list of modifiers that more then doubles that number.

It has seating for over 60, but does not offer table service. They also take phone orders. Although it serves a large menu, it operates mostly like a Cafe, or quick service operation.

Issues at Hand

• Order taking is very difficult and too slow.
• Work flow inhibits sales. Hand written orders are taken at the counter, and then rung into the cash register. Those tickets are then transferred to the bar and the kitchen. Errors are frequent because of handwriting and because of difficulty of order distribution.
• Prices are memorized; therefore prices go up and down according to memory. There is no PLU tracking of items. Modifier up-charges are lost in the effort of trying to input the order. Modifiers for things like bread for sandwiches are forgotten during order taking and cause errors.
• There is no accountability of employees to charge correct prices, or charge at all.
• No sales information for products is tracked. The only comparison they can do is what they purchased to what they see in inventory.
• No sales information for employees on register is tracked.
• No sales information is tracked by time. It is difficult to schedule labor.
• Credit Card processing is slow, when serving a line or during a busy day this causes customer stress because 30 seconds is always added to transaction times.

Resolution
Install 1 Cafe Cartel POS terminal to replace cash register for sales and order input.

• Use Time Clock to reduce managerÕs office work and log employees order taking.
• Create managed work flow environment for employees.
  • Remove Hand written orders. Increase clarity with printed material.
  • Send orders to printers in three locations. Speeds up item preparation.
  • Force charging of modifiers.
  • Create work flow of menu items i.e. Sandwich: Bread Type, Cheese type, etc. Reduces order taking time and errors.
  • Ensure proper pricing is always applied.
  • Control discounting and force itemized receipts for customers: this adds accountability.
• Added DSL based credit card processing. Reduces transaction time by about 30 seconds.

Results
Often with up to 10 people in line, the wait was reduced by up to 5 minutes. They are able to operate with higher customer satisfaction because of reduced errors, also they were able to do it with reduced effort from employees.

• After a year of using the Cafe Cartel Point of Sale system they added a second terminal because of the increase in business.
• The operation was able to make a ten year high in sales and transactions on their busiest day, July 4 th.
• Modifiers are now charged; return of cost was almost immediately realized. The loss of modifier up charges was estimated to be around $400.00 per month.

• More appropriately price items were developed: by tracking item sales, then having a focus on what to and not to provide.
  • They increased sales without having to revamp the entire pricing structure by increasing the price a small amount on high volume items.
  • Reduced food cost by identifying items that were being wasted and not sold.
• DSL based credit card processing now allows 3 transactions per minute instead of 1. Integrated credit card processing reduces errors between cash register and credit card terminal.