Go Natural is a Portuguese chain offering fast but healthy food. The dishes on offer include salads, noodle dishes and 100% fruit juices, and even sushi and soup. Enhancing the healthy experience with quality food is central to the corporate mission of Go Natural. Go Natural is headquartered in Lisbon and counts 29 restaurant outlets operating in Portugal, employing more than 250 people.
Business case
Prior to implementing LS Central for restaurants, the company did not use any structured solution. The company used an extensive number of different vertical applications, which made it impossible to consolidate data. Due to the high turnover of the company and high rates of absenteeism within the sector, and also because of the geographical dispersion of the chain’s restaurants, Go Natural decided to shift to a management system that could give them greater control over their business information. The use of diverse systems led to issues with data integrity and manual data re-entry. In the absence of an automated environment, all the different systems acted as separate entities. Because of the disparate systems, it was very hard to carry out critical functions including communication, compilation and replication of data among all outlets and the head office. Apart from being a time-consuming activity, manual re-entry of data required much man-power and often resulted in inaccuracies along with higher administrative cost. In fact, because of the need to enter data manually, the management was unable to take new initiatives. Go Natural knew that disparate, standalone systems could no longer meet its requirements, especially as the company has ambitious plans for growth. When the company needed to replace the aging and disparate systems used, they saw it as an opportunity to raise the bar in how they interact with customers, as well as improve the overall customer insight capabilities.
The solution
The products implemented in this project were Microsoft Dynamics ERP and LS Central for restaurants, with the standard modules of Accounting, Sales, Purchases, Warehouse and Assets. The company worked with Microsoft Gold ERP competency Partner and LS Retail partner in Portugal, Arquiconsult, to install the product and adapt it to local legal and language requirements. The modules were complemented by the Arquiconsult human resources add-on. During the implementation, additional functionality was developed to control the entries and exits and consequent distribution of cost, based upon the register on the LS Retail software POS for the management of all shops. In the end, the implemented solution enables, among other aspects, an automation of operations of wage processing; automatic integration of payrolls in the financial area, in accordance with most legal requirements; the control of end of work contracts and, lastly, the automatic distribution of costs in accordance with the rotation of employees in the chain of shops. The LS Retail software solution is a flexible POS-based solution that can be configured according to the customer's requirements and maintains common data over the entire organization. Since the POS terminals, back office and head office, all use the same application and functionalities, the individual transactions can be tracked directly from the head office.
The company wanted to be able to effectively manage their recipes across the operation, as this is an important part of their natural, healthy experience. With LS Central for restaurants, Go Natural can perform their recipe management functions such as grouping by main ingredient, style and category, registering production time and instructions for cooking, additional items such as utensils and trays, use sets of different ingredients temporarily and then go back to the normal recipe by maintaining recipe versions. The company can register the quantities of recipe ingredients for a set number of portions, and the program calculates the quantities for one portion, registers the recipe quantities for each ingredient in any unit of measure, stores and displays nutritional information showing the nutrient values - and more.
The solution has vastly enhanced efficiency in operational practices and increased profitability, information analysis and data quality. Go Natural is more efficient and can quickly attend to customer requirements. Service is quicker, with significantly improved transaction time. LS Central for restaurants system is easy to use, which reduced training time. LS Central for restaurants also ensures total data and system integrity across the company.
Benefits
- Complete hospitality and recipe management solution, from back office to front of house
- Standard interface across the board
- Greatly improved transaction time
- Reliable business information
- Eliminates manual processes, saving person-hours
- Allows data analysis for enhanced business decisions
