Cloud is the future for restaurant industry

Benefit from a move to the cloud.

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The restaurant and fast-food sectors have successfully digitalised, but to realise the full benefits of digital transformation, they need to look seriously to cloud migration, says Reginald Sibeko, Managing Director at Micros SA.

“Cloud has a number of key benefits for the food and beverage industry, benefits that can help it to radically improve profitability, reduce costs and deliver an overall better experience both for customers and employees,” he says. “Another key benefit is security – a major concern globally given the ongoing surge in ransomware and hacking incidents, not forgetting the shortage and expense of highly skilled cyber security professionals.”

Cloud applications hosted on vendor platforms such as Oracle Cloud are protected by state-of-the art cyber security technology combined with sophisticated control centres offering 24/7 monitoring and response. Cloud partners such as Oracle improve resilience by offering multiple redundancy.

In addition, if connectivity is lost, a cloud application can typically be run locally, with new data uploaded when connectivity is restored – this is certainly the case with Oracle Simphony Cloud.

Reginald Sibeko, Managing Director, Micros SA.

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The experience of Southern Sun, a leading hotel group, offers a convincing case study of the benefits offered by cloud solutions. Southern Sun has long worked closely with Micros SA, and has been running the Oracle Simphony point-of-sale software in its hotels’ food-and-beverage outlets. Allister Dunlop, Southern Sun Information Systems Manager, says that moving to cloud where it makes sense is a key strategy for the group.

“The Simphony version being used in our hotels outside of South Africa was reaching end of life, so that prompted us to make the move to Oracle Simphony Cloud for them,” he says. Five hotels have already made the transition, which will be completed when the team finishes with the Seychelles property this month.

Shifting each hotel’s food-and-beverage outlets to Oracle Simphony Cloud takes around a month, “so it’s very speedy”, comments Dunlop.

Dunlop says a key driver was the reduction in cost of ownership given that no hardware besides workstations need to be purchased, and expensive software licences are replaced by subscription pricing. There’s also the elimination of secondary expenses related to electricity, floorspace for servers and the teams to manage them.

“Owning equipment and licences, and hosting the solution, are all onerous and expensive,” he adds. “We will certainly be looking at moving the South African hotels to the cloud in the future.”

Of course, being on the cloud means the company no longer faces the challenge of keeping its software up to date, as the latest version is always implemented with no downtime.

Aside from the cost and effort benefits, Dunlop says moving to Oracle Simphony Cloud has opened up a number of key benefits. One of these is access to BI analytics and real-time reporting, allowing managers to monitor important metrics (such as sales and speed of service) in real-time – even on their phones.

Another important benefit relates to innovation, according to Dunlop. Thanks to Simphony’s robust, open API (application programmer interface), integration with third-party applications is basically plug and play. This makes it easy to integrate and implement value-add solutions to our guests and employees. As an example, Southern Sun is currently working on integrating Simphony with a contactless room service solution so as to improve the guest experience while making it easier for employees and managers to deliver.

Sibeko points out that moving to the cloud also has the benefit of positioning the client for growth.

“By making more functionality available and supporting innovation, moving to the cloud can play a significant role in supporting a business’s growth strategy,” he points out. “And because cloud is inherently easy to scale, growth can be accommodated easily, instead of creating bottlenecks and requiring new infrastructure, as it does with the on-premises model.

“Cloud really is the future.”