Issue/market opportunity

Issue/market opportunity

The current problem for the restaurant owners is that they are suffering a hard time to effectively manage their employees for the shifts. The paper management and old local computer management system is out of date, which cause them a lot of unnecessary money to put on the daily scheduling task. The cost of time and efforts are very high and their option for scheduling system is very limit since those systems are very expensive and inefficient.  There is a great possibility that a new restaurant scheduling system will provide more functionalities than the current ones and replace them eventually. This new system will provide more ways of doing business and preforming scheduling  tasks such as enabling cell phone integrations, central database and fast responding which will eventually reduce the cost of employee management and increase the efficiency of managing part time and full time employees in a restaurant.

Based on the opportunity screen, we find that there are potentials that we can find as opportunity to compete with existing vendors in the market. First of all, the system that we are promoting to the market has an improvement concept of the existing systems and can be viewed as a “new generation” product. It can not only provide basic functions but also the premium functions on the network to link to other digital medias and enable our primary customers link themselves to other industries and internet community. The customers are reachable and easy to contact. They are local restaurant owners and we can easily find them using the yellow book or search their conduct information online. The benefits of this system to users are significant. It will save the restaurant owners’ time on planning their employee’s schedule, managing human resource and improve productivity. Furthermore, since the product is not tangible, therefore it has an infinite life time than physical products. As long as we can properly maintain and provide updates to it, customer can use it as long as they want.

The market size is huge; there is a billion dollar restaurant market in the US and much bigger one internationally. The trend of information technology and internet will also make the digital restaurant market grow bigger and faster in the near future. In terms of cost, we do have very competitive advantage on keep operational cost low and profit margin high. Since we are internet based company, there is no need to hire someone to operate in stores and the money saved from renting local stores are huge especially for a startup company. On the other hand, there are also big cost exist including development f the new system, marketing and human resource. The development process may be the most expensive one because it is related to hiring technical people, building up labs and applying for intellectual property protection.