Café La Mode improves processes and increase customer satisfaction with MS Dynamics NAV and LS NAV Hospitality

About the company

Café La Mode is not the regular coffee shop one would expect! It is a Cypriot restaurant chain, striving to provide guests with top quality food and experience. For the convenience of its customers, Café La Mode offers а variety of services – pleasant premises with refreshing atmosphere for guests to enjoy their stay; take-away and delivery options; organization of private events and weekly buffet gatherings.

In addition, being part of Voici La Mode – a local franchisee of Marks & Spencer and Celio, Café La Mode collaborates with the other companies in the group in offering joint promotions and initiatives.

The situation

During the years, Café La Mode used to work with locally developed POS software – a stand-alone solution lacking in integration with the Accounting and Warehouse application used in the Head Office. The only connection that existed between these two systems was the export/import transfer of files recurring on a daily basis. Moreover, every POS was an independent software installation – i.e. a decentralized unit that had to be set up individually whenever changes in a recipe or a promotion were introduced. This was a time-consuming and expensive activity owing to the fact that such changes occurred regularly (on some occasions – several times every week). However, this was not the only problem. The process of manual configuration of POS instances one by one was prone to mistakes and omissions. For instance, once it happened that the personnel were not able to deliver the promotion offered, as the set-up was wrong. Consequently, there were some frustrated customers and profit loss.

The recipe follow-up was yet another resourceful task. All the data needed was kept in Excel spreadsheets, which was inhibitive of the management’s tracking of stock levels and taking proper actions in time. This affected the planning and replenishment procedures, as decisions made were frequently based on insufficient information.

Excel was the preferred tool for Buffet and Event organization and followup and Café La Mode experienced difficulties with calculation and analysis of such activities.

Café La Mode management team realized they needed a comprehensive hospitality system and turned to PhoenixPro for assistance. The latter, being a consulting company, collaborated with the holding entity – Voici La Mode – in a project for identification of the appropriate solution. The parties compiled all the requirements in an extensive RFP (request for Café La Mode, Cyprus proposal) and decided on implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV and LS Nav Hospitality – a single solution capable of covering all the retail and hospitality needs described in the RFP of the company.

A tender was carried out and Intelligent Systems was preferred over several other solution vendors due to the extensive experience in the related fields

The solution

The project started with the implementation of the LS Retail functionalities for Hospitality, Member management, Client management, Price management (Promotions, pricing, offers, and coupons), and Replenishment. A Take-away and Delivery functionality was also introduced but it was slightly customized so as to follow the local VAT regulations, applying to such services. For the business needs of Café La Mode, the Microsoft Dynamics NAV modules for Accounting and Finance, Purchase, Sales, and Warehouse were also integrated.

Important functionalities, introduced by the team of Intelligent Systems, were the Intercompany transactions and the loyalty scheme. Sharing a common loyalty program with the Marks & Spencer and Celio retail stores of Voici La Mode, the restaurant chain is now able to provide to its many customers greater value than ever.

Passing the “User acceptance test” (used to verify that every process stipulated in the detailed requirements document is strictly followed by the software solution), made the official release run smoothly and with no major difficulties.

Key benefits

The unified platform of Microsoft Dynamics and LS NAV Hospitality streamlines every key business process in Café La Mode and provides numerous benefits, among them:

• Centralized POS management (restaurant management), as now all changes and set-ups are made once in the Head Office and are then replicated automatically to the locations. This eliminates significantly the risk of mistakes and omissions
• Integration of all operations with the business accounts provides on-line accounting information vital for management decisions
• Follow-up of the cost of the recipes is transformed into an easy and simple routine as all information is held and retrieved in one place
• The management has real-time overview of sales, profits, and inventory levels
• Chefs and Restaurant Managers are able to make orders to the Head Office on the basis of the average consumption
• The consumption is posted automatically based on the recipes; A weekly stock-taking process of reporting deviations of recipes, shortages and surpluses of particular goods is now introduced
• Rapid Buffet and Event organization cost, revenue and analysis procedures
• Improved Reservation management with quick access to information regarding capacities booked/available per restaurant