Successful Technology Integration in Olive Garden Restaurants Case Study Answer

Olive Garden

Olive Garden is deemed the topmost casual dining restaurant in the USA which is famous for its Italian cuisine. It was founded in 1982 and is considered the globe’s largest business (Light 2020). This hospitality brand comes under the category of full-service dining and is usually reported as a company that provides table service and fairly priced food in an open environment. It has more than 800 restaurants and is run by nearly 92000 workforce. This brand has been encouraged by the comfort and authentic hospitality of the individuals in Italy and the relevance of family in their culture (Parasecoli 2019). The mission of the company is to be financially successful via great individuals constantly providing excellent food, softdrinks, and services in an appealing environment, making each diner loyal. Values of the brand include being of service; inclusion & diversity; respect & caring; integrity & fairness; teamwork; excellence; and always learning, always teaching. This company is further dedicated to making a variance in the lives of other individuals within the native community (Olive Garden 2023).

There is no doubt that hospitality brands have surged their capitalizations in technology since they see clients more readily holding it for off-premises orders over the prior year (Karniouchina et al. 2022). It is found that the technology in the Olive Graden Restaurant has enlarged ahead of its cash registers to involve terminals that reception workforces utilize to check in visitors and kitchen displays that queue up orders for cooks out back. The motive of the brand’s check-level analytics technology is to collect data from each step of the visitor experience and utilize it to make superior managerial decisions (Corbisiero et al. 2022). The check-level analytics was the initial investment by Olive Graden in its digital transformation approach. Further, Olive Garden and its sister brands all utilize common website channels to appeal to clients. This has included the virtual processing of takeout orders wherein Olive Garden lagged (Schneider et al. 2021).

It has been asserted by Romeo (2020) that the Olive Garden Restaurant's warehouse just added a newer technological feature that enables click-and-collect clients to alert a part of their arrival by striking a link set in a text sent ahead of time to their mobiles. With regards to making the process of ordering easy, the Olive Garden restaurant has installed computer tablets at the entire USA location so that clients can order and pay using the touch screens. It has been found that this initiative by the company at its outlets has resulted in faster dining times and increased tip percentages for the waiter workforce. This restaurant chain has capitalized on technologies for virtual ordering and announced novel competencies like to-go capacity management for Curbside I'm Here and operator notifications to refine the clients' experiences. With this, it was seen that around 64 percent of the restaurant's to-go orders were done virtually and about 14 percent of the entire sales of the brand were digital dealings (Ruggless 2021). This brand has been using data analytics in its marketing operations to refine and enlarge the visitor experience. It has further moved from a mass-marketing strategy to a targeted-marketing approach with the assistance of its guest analytical channel. It is found that data is utilized to constantly acquire about guest tastes and actions, enabling the hospitality brand to segment guests and offer personalized messages. There are four major areas of the data approach of Olive Garden namely strong data gathering & solid channel foundation; focus on testing & learnings; data science competencies; and recognition of marketing as a cross-channel approach. Such areas enable the Olive Garden brand to seize insights and target the correct clients at the correct time with the right message. The brand was able to impact the guest experiences and explore superior ways to draw clients back to the outlet (Duhé 2021).

Further, the Ziosk wine tablet, accessible at restaurant tables, was created as an internal technique that enables visitors to search for information and suppose wine and food pairing recommendations (Recasens 2017). Such technical devices further assist diners in becoming comfortable and informed with the conventional Italian idea that wine is food and none of the means accomplished in the absence of it. To deal with the few workforces at Olive Garden during the pandemic Covid-19, the company was found to use AI (artificial intelligence) to refine prediction preciseness at its outlets, so that management can schedule workforces more effectively. Also, this restaurant brand has streamlined menus to make the preparation of food less worker-intensive (Wang and Papastathopoulos 2023). With respect to the limitation of Olive Garden's technological systems, it was found that the data of its guests was compromised in a cyber assault incident. The data breach happened on a legacy scheme of Cheddar restaurant. In view of dealing with it, the brand has disabled and substituted the legacy system as part of the merger collaboration procedure. Moreover, the Olive Garden has involved a third-party forensic cybersecurity business to explore the event or incident (Reuters 2018).

Wagamama Restaurant

The Wagamama Restaurant is the largest hospitality organization in the UK. It has a diversified portfolio of popular and cherished brands that operate nearly 400 restaurants and pubs up and down the nation. It was encouraged by quick-paced, Japanese ramen bars (O’Brien 2019). This brand serves healthy Japanese dishes which are adapted to the tastes of Europeans. The main goal of the Wagamama restaurant is to comprehend how diners view their experience and what forces inspire this (Darroze 2022). It is regarding making a variation between the diverse channels such as delivery, eating in, and gathering, each of which possesses its exclusive client challenges and journeys. It has been found that food is deemed the heart of this brand's experience. Therefore, being able to view the dish-level numbers is essential to advocating the imagination of new dishes and the influence of any changes to cooking procedures (HGEM 2023).

With regard to technological integration, the Wagamama Company, since its establishment, developed a positioning for utilizing technology to refine the effectiveness of its restaurant procedures (Spence et al. 2019). It was found that the waiters from the start took the client's orders through the entry of information using a hand-held technological device. It is said that such an order was impulsively sent wirelessly through the POS (point of sale) machine to the kitchen wherein the order was posted on the printers in the kitchen. This technology use at Wagamama has a positive impact on its workforce's efficiency. The POS software preserved a running tally of orders for every table and it updated stock entries. Therefore, rather than having the waiter take hand-written orders, the waiter moved on to the subsequent client (Raho 2021). It meant that order processing was initiated instantly after the kitchen got the order. Every table order was eventually transferred to a kitchen's terminal, to facilitate multifold workforces to work in a similar order. It was further found that this system surged the productivity of the waiter workforce by facilitating them to serve more clients in less time. Besides, the technological system surged client gratification since every order was delivered by the kitchen workforce instead of the waiter workforce who had taken the order, and the client reached quicker at the tables (Dedeke 2015).

The recent application launched by Wagamama Restaurant is Wagamamago which enables diners to bypass the wait workforce and pay automatically. It is considered the globe's first frictionless pay application to eat out and save individuals an average of 12 minutes by sweeping away the usual bill pay procedure (Brennan 2022). This technology operates via a smartphone application created by Mastercard. This enables clients to use to check-in to a definite restaurant over the mobile network. Furthermore, the company has given early priority to setting up a loyalty card scheme for the daily clients of the brand with the use of a new POS software namely Aloha's in-built functionality. The major motive is to refine Wagamama's systems integration by possessing its novel PoS software function with other operations like accounting so that the information might be transferred from one to another. This has lessened the manual data inputs, evaded expensive key mistakes, and lessened workforce demands. Building on outstanding client engagement channels, new websites use modern techniques in development and designing, from parallax scroll to responsive designing, for a multi-equipment age. Created to offer an innate user experience via a targeted content approach, the fans of the Wagamama brand are capable of investigating newer dishes, making brand bookings, and ordering takeaways from the available, creatively designed website (Oseland 2021).

Lessons from Cases in Technology Adoption

It is clear that both the industry leaders Wagamama, and Olive Garden with their technology integration have set a successful example for other hospitality businesses in the market globally. The chosen industry leaders are extremely open to technological adoption and are found to not be reluctant to invest in newer technological solutions which might increase the workforce's efficiency as well as client satisfaction. The leaders adopting technologies identify the relevance of adaptability and scalability (Mariani and Wamba 2020). They are found to invest in information technology solutions that align with the varying trends and demands (Putta et al. 2021). It is also suggested by these hospitality brands that they must use data analytics to know client preferences and marketplace patterns. It is learned that the use of AI might assist full-service restaurants to run more successfully by automating activities like food preparation, and inventory management (Tong-On et al. 2021). It not just secures time and assets, but also assists in lessening food waste. The robots used by the chosen restaurants were helpful in handling daily client inquiries and complaints and freeing the workforce to emphasize more relevant activities. Besides, it is learned that numerous digital techniques like kiosks, tableside tablets, and more which were used by Wagamama, and Olive Garden not only refine client services but also assists proprietor in mining the data on their client to superiorly fulfill their needs (Cheong et al. 2021).

Approaches to Deal with Challenges of Technology Adoption or Integration

Numerous strategies can be employed to overcome the issues and surge the benefits of technology adoption within the hospitality industry. It is suggested by industry leaders that sufficient workforce communications and training are needed to deal with the challenges of technology integration. Workers should thoroughly be trained to attain a constant implementation procedure of technology adoption (Dwivedi et al. 2023). Continuous communication on the advantages of technology to be adopted might assist in easing any workforce's worries, endorsing a favorable outlook to technical optimizations. A technique of progressive implementation might be more fruitful than announcing numerous technologies at a time. Since probable concerns might be identified and managed before moving forward to further steps, phased deployment offers superior management of likely problems. Such an approach further enables workforces and diners to gradually adapt to the changes (Floričić 2020).

Moreover, it is vital to keep the human touch in the hospitality industry at the time of technology adoption. Individual in-person connections and superior client service might still differentiate eateries from rivals (Davari et al. 2022). Human collaborations must be improved instead of replacing technology. Provided the relevance of client data, cybersecurity, and data privacy must be considered. Executing robust security measures and obeying data privacy norms are vital to developing client confidence and maintaining their information. Such input helps in recognizing areas of improvement and certifying that the technologies chosen remain pertinent and effective (Gaur et al. 2021).

Reference

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