Concept

Concept Generation

                After carefully research the market and current competitors’ systems, we found that there are still two major areas that we still have the opportunity to be dominate in. First one is the communication channel within organization and communication between organization and local community/labor market. We proposed several concept to reach our thoughts. And we rate these concepts and select them on the basis of technical resource, budget and market requests.

Basic logic:

i.                     All the restaurant who registered as a member will be able to create a profile such as a personal profile on facebook

ii.                   All registered employee will be given an invisible profile that has all his personal information but can only see by himself and the recruiters.

iii.                 Restaurant profile is open to both employees and public, employees who registered to have been working with the restaurant will be granted the right to leave feedback for employment experience and public can leave feedback for restaurant in general any time

iv.                 System can be used to search restaurants and people on name, location, size, type, price, rating and ranking criteria. 

Specific functions that the system should provide

1.       Scheduling part

A.      The system should be able to cancel/make appointment

B.      The system will return all free slack for employees(employers) to pick

C.       The scheduling logic should be able to be modified by employer

D.      System can send the notification to employees and employers

E.      Save logs and also transaction on central database

F.       Remote control and VPN access

G.      The client access should be available on all platforms: email, messenger,sms,etc

2.       Labor selection part

A.      Employer can post job positions on their profile

B.      Local job hunters can view the information including restaurant type, employer, feedback from other employees and available shifts and apply for the position

C.       The information/resume and feedback from previous of the applicant will be viewed by employer

3.       Local residence communication

A.      Local residence can view feedback of restaurant and it promotions 

B.      Local residence can leave feedback and post pictures on the restaurant profile

C.       System will filter any unhealthy content during the process

4.       Digital connections

A.      Restaurant can post picture/video/audio and blogs on their profile. Their profile is editable to align the design of their website.

B.      The profile can be shared to other social networks such as twitter and facebook

C.       Central server enable other functions such as clock in, clock out and location service for the employers.

D.      Central server also provide common restaurant functions such as take order, check out and calculate pricing to the customers as additional package.

E.      Special device like a Ipad to make the order process much easier and the system will be enabled on that device. The device function can also be available for Ipad or Iphone after downloading a certain application.

F.       When a customer is in a restaurant and open his smartphone, the application on his cellphone will automatically inform him where he is and what are some famous dishes in this restaurant as well as other information if he choose to view.

Concept selection

            Although fulfilling the functionality that restaurant can build communication channel with local market and labor force is important, the current and most important functionality that we are trying to accomplish is to make sure that the internal management requirements can be met and employee’s schedule cost can be reduced.  In additional, the employee’s communication functionality has technical constraint since in order to accomplish this functionality there are very high customization and communication device programing development fees. For example, if the employees use different cell phone operation systems such as google, iphone and android, the programing language are totally different. Therefore, based on the reality and cost/risk analysis, we decide to first focus on the basic goals to reduce the restaurant’s cost and implement the additional functions in future update package.

We have put the essential and technically difficult to accomplished concept into a concept selection table for further analysis: (the concept will be represented as number plus letter from the list in the concept generation secion)

Criteria	1E	2C	3C		4D	5F
Ease of design	-	-	+		+	0
Ease of handling	+	-	+		0	-
Does metering	0	0	0		-	0
Load handling	0	-	+		-	0
Programing  possibility	+	+	-		-	+
Plus	1	1	3	1			1
Same	2	1	1	1			3
Minus	1	3	1	3			1
N et	1	-2	2	-2			0
	Yes	No	Yes	No			yes

By comparing these few additional concepts, we believe that customer may concern more on the availability of cell phone applications because that is the easiest and common way people use for communication. And they will be interested in promoting customers with their new products and promotions through cell phone. Therefore we choose 5F which the cell phone communication app for better communication between restaurant and their customers. Also, from our own perspective, a centralize database and server and add great advantage to our product and customers would be willing to use one single vender for all their IT application because it is easier to manage and upgrade. And I believe that the function that server can provide to customer for their common tasks will give us an opportunity to charge a premium and finally expand our business to restaurant general management market in the future. Therefore we will also keep 1E and 3c which are the development of database and server.

                In the real world, nothing can be perfect, and with more competition, we ought to put more time and efforts to focus on our competitive advantage which is the digital restaurant system. We will need to focus on moving restaurant business to the digital media field and finally build up the empire of online restaurant community.