Red Hot World Buffet (RHWB), the buffet restaurant operator that is attracting private equity interest, has invested in a new IT strategy across its seven restaurants ahead of a planned expansion to over 20 units by 2015.
The planned roll out of the systems across the seven-strong group’s restaurants signals its intention to build a fully integrated infrastructure ahead of scheduled expansion plans, with five new restaurants due to open in the next year across the country.
The move began with the roll out of a customer service IT system across all branches, completed in November. The IT strategy will be fully implemented in 2013, by which time the brand aims to have integrated a new people, payroll and time and attendance solution, as well as a food and beverage (FnB) solution, at all restaurant locations.
Both solutions will be supplied by Fourth, the global leader in engineering cloud-based, end-to-end hospitality management systems. The people system has already been successfully trialled at Red Hot’s busiest restaurant in Manchester and went live at all other locations in January, with FnB roll out due to commence soon after.
Steve Wilkinson, financial director at Red Hot, said: “The adoption of the new systems comes at a time when we’re investing in core elements of the business. Following the continued success and growth of the brand, we want to have integrated restaurant and head office accounting and back office systems, in place to support our planned expansion programme. The joint solution from TISSL and Fourth can achieve that and really represented the only option for us.
“Not only does an integrated approach offer unrivalled ease of use, speed and accuracy, but a cloud-based solution will allow us to automatically poll data centrally on a daily basis for integration with our existing accounting software, leading to a hugely streamlined and efficient operation, and much quicker response times and decision making.”
