PAN India Foods Solutions Pvt Ltd

With a chain of around 200 dining destinations across India, PAN India Food Solutions Pvt. Ltd. took over the business of Blue Foods and is today one of the leading Restaurant management companies in the country. Pan India caters to a wide cross-section of clientele through a range of brands - Spaghetti Kitchen, Gelato Italiano, Food Talk, Bombay Blues, Copper Chimney and Spoon Food Courts.

A Cashless Point of Sale

At a recently launched high-street mall in the suburbs of Mumbai, India, Pan India opened their food court under the brand name ‘Spoon’ – a multi-cuisine dining food-court.  The food-court is unique in the sense that it works on the concept of cashless operations at the outlets. Normal Magnetic Debit cards of different denominations are charged and issued to the customers at the Front Desk Cashier bank, which are then used as in-store debit cards and swiped at the outlets where the transactions happen.
The debit cards can be re-charged in case its value falls below the thresh-hold and are redeemed in case there is any balance left.

The Need for Debit POS

Oberoi Mall at Mumbai, India, is one of the busiest, high street malls, attracting a large foot-fall.  Over the weekends, the mall records very high numbers most of which visit the food court.

PAN India’s brand – Spoon Food Courts, a multi-cuisine operation provides one of the best choices in various kinds of dining and therefore has to manage a large number of customers.

Catering to such diverse needs puts enormous pressure on the operating staff especially while managing cash at various billing outlets.

To overcome the travails of cash management, which not only impacts the business but also the morale of the team members, Pan India chose to introduce the concept of a Smart Debit POS.

ShawMan’s “SmartDebit” POS concept eliminates the need to settle against cash, which is the most popular settlement form in a multi-cuisine environment in a mall. However, cash based transactions are done at few strategic and manageable locations to trade for currency loaded on regular magnetic cards.

The Perfect Recipe for Cashless Business

Pan India explored various options for managing their outlets and after some serious evaluations selected ShawMan’s POS, “SmartDebit” plug-in to ShawMan POS, and a centrally hosted Web based Materials Management applications for managing their operations and information needs.

Says Mr. Siddharth, Head IT, Pan India Foods Solution, “We found ShawMan Software had the expertise and capability to handle our unique business needs.  The application was also easy to use which helped us reduce our time to learn and helped us to launch the food court on schedule.” The application was supported on specialized IBM POS terminals with MSR [for reading the SmartDebit encoded magnetic swipe cards] and EPSON printers that support fast 40-column printing.

The billing application is designed to support multiple styles of operations viz – take away, counter sale, fine dining etc. This provided the convenience to configure processes on POS terminals in an ad-hoc manner to support business volumes in the food-court.

Preparing the Supper

The opening of the outlets was timed along with the opening of the mall and hence implementing the applications in a timely manner was of critical importance to the management of Pan India.

The Corporate and Operational teams of Pan India worked along with ShawMan consultants on an extremely tight implementation programme which eventually gave minimal time for the front line staff to practice on the applications.

The applications consisted of the biller operations for all combination in the multi-cuisine scenario.  This was further supported by the SmartDebit POS plug-in application that was linked to all POS terminals over a local area network.  The software had to be tested with the third party applications for magnetic cards and interfaced to it.

All the POS billing terminals were connected back to a remotely hosted central server that controlled menu items, pricing and other policies that Pan India wanted to implement.

Various cost centers were defined for outlets to do inventory management of finished products and semi-finished products at their ends, the raw material receiving and warehouse management activities were done from PCs connected over the internet to the back office server using the Materials Management System.

ShawMan’s Web based MMS [Materials Management System], which is a centralized application was installed in a web server and configured from the head office.  The policies were defined for purchase, stocking, disposals and costing of items.  These costs combined with the recipe management application to generate the food cost report for the senior management. The managerial and supervisory cadres were exposed to certain flash reports on revenue and stock to take operational level decisions.
The day end process from the POS updated all revenue, cost as well as margin parameters, which was then consolidated with other outlets of Blue Foods across the country for daily collection information.

The entire process was tested with sample data and then the staff was trained on the applications to operate as well as to do any minor software management to support the operations in an unfailing manner.

User profiles were created and masters were updated with actual data and the system was ready to go live just when the mall was ready for its opening.

In the course of the implementation ShawMan consultants also worked in parallel teams to set up the complete infrastructure for servers, networks, Internet connectivity and interfacing with third party vendor applications.
ShawMan provided a turn-key support including migrating the users from temporary hardware to POS terminals after the operations had gone live.