Dineware Restaurant POS Software Case Studies

Learn how Dinerware can help your restaurant succeed.

Anthony's Homeport Case Study

Incorporated in 1972, Anthony’s Restaurants owns and operates a family of 23 waterfront restaurants in 18 locations throughout the Pacific Northwest. From classic “to go” eateries to casual dining and relaxed dinner houses, Anthony’s core commitment to fresh Northwest seafood complemented by local produce as well as Northwest wines and microbrews is the foundation for each concept.

The first Anthony’s HomePort opened in 1975 in Kirkland on the Eastern shores of Lake Washington. The success of this relaxed, waterfront dinner house resulted in 11 additional Anthony’s HomePorts located in Des Moines, Edmonds, Everett, Bellingham, Bremerton, Gig Harbor, Richland, Seattle at Shilshole Bay, Spokane and Olympia, as well as Bend, Oregon.

In 2005, Anthony’s initiated a search to replace their computerized point-of-sale restaurant system. They realized that their existing system was not adequate to support the company’s growing operations in the future for the following reasons:

·         The system’s capabilities were outdated with no plans for further development.

·         The system was not user-friendly and training new wait staff on the system was costly.

·         The equipment broke down frequently causing interruption to customer service, staff frustration, and increasing support expenses, and Anthony’s Restaurants was not comfortable with the availability and speed of service from their local reseller.

·         There was no linkage between restaurant locations and Anthony’s Restaurant headquarters, so critical business information was transmitted to and from each location manually on disks and delivered to the home office by hand.

·         Anthony’s wanted the latest technology in their new system; they wanted a system that would serve as a flexible platform to build and grow their business on well into the future. The IT staff was specifically looking for the capability to customize, integrate, and create add-ons to meet their unique needs over time.

The decision to replace the company’s point-of-sale system coincided with a major shift in how Anthony’s managed its information technology resources. Prior to 2005, Anthony’s had limited IT staff capabilities and responded to location specific IT needs by calling the reseller of their system to meet all of their end user support needs.

Anthony’s built a small and focused IT team to accomplish this objective. The new IT staff knew they had to increase their ability to communicate and transfer information accurately throughout their enterprise. The team developed their own back of house enterprise system to centralize their approach and selected Microsoft® SQL Server as their company standard for database management.

During their selection process, Anthony’s reviewed several top competitive solutions. While a relative newcomer to the industry in comparison with its competition, Dinerware’s senior management team demonstrated its commitment to the project’s successful outcome, as well as industry leading customer satisfaction with the Dinerware system as noted in recent competitive reviews of hospitality systems.

Each of the solutions reviewed provided Anthony’s with the capability to achieve tighter integration across the enterprise. Dinerware’s competitors offered a comprehensive enterprise management system; the cost and complexity of those systems seemed prohibitive and difficult to customize to meet Anthony’s specific requirements. Dinerware’s approach was more flexible and open. By training the IT staff on the system’s database structure and using application programming interfaces (APIs) built into the product, and using standard Microsoft SQL Server enterprise data management features, Anthony’s could take ownership of their overall IT strategy and evolve it over time.

After careful consideration and input from the home office, general managers, and members of their wait staff, the project team lead, Geri Sellers, backed by Ray Caldwell (CFO), and Budd Gould (owner), made the final decision to deploy Dinerware throughout all of Anthony’s restaurant locations.

Anthony’s IT team quickly sat down with Dinerware to build a rollout plan tailored to Anthony’s unique needs. They clearly wanted a high quality implementation but they also had a strong desire to identify areas where they could achieve significant cost savings by using their own resources to take on the bulk of the ongoing responsibilities for implementation, training, and end user support.

The project scope was ambitious. The goal was to complete implementation of all locations within a ten month period, before holiday season hit in late Fall of 2006. Anthony’s Bell Street location was the most complex with 3 different concepts under one roof 20 touch screen terminals throughout. The Bell Street hardware installation started at midnight on a Sunday night and was completed successfully by the next morning in time to open for lunch on Monday.

Dinerware led the implementation at the first three locations with assistance and shadowing by Anthony’s IT team. The fourth and subsequent locations were managed entirely by Anthony’s Restaurants without any direct support needed from Dinerware.

Each location had the capability during their implementation to customize the system’s setup based on the General Manager’s requests. A base menu was established to shorten the time required to modify menu items and the IT team very quickly mastered the process of staging and installing the Dinerware software with the touch screen hardware selected by Anthony’s to go into each location.

Throughout the rollout schedule very few issues surfaced, and those that did were quickly resolved by Anthony’s IT team and Dinerware. By October 23rd, 2006 with the installation at Harbor Lights in Tacoma, all locations originally scheduled were completed successfully.

Since the original plan, Anthony’s has opened one new restaurant which is presently being implemented, with two additional planned for March, 2007.

The Anthony’s team was vocal about the overall success of the project. It was on time, on budget, and the deployment has exceeded Anthony’s expectations. By going with Dinerware, Anthony’s reports an anticipated annual system support cost savings of $150,000 -$200,000 simply by reducing the amount of support required from their previous reseller.

Now with Dinerware, the General Managers at each location have control of their Dinerware system and can make their own menu changes, create new jobs and employees, access critical reports, and run their restaurant without the need for assistance from support staff.

To date Dinerware is running reliably at each location, and Anthony’s Restaurants has done the basic integration work needed to view reports from each location at their headquarters without any manual processes.

In addition:

·         From a wait staff standpoint, ease of using the system and increased reliability has significantly improved employee morale and customer service. Geri states that, “Dinerware made our staff comfortable with the system.”

·         Anthony’s enterprise system monitors store level price changes, giving more control to restaurant managers while giving the home office critical visibility to monitor changes over time.

·         Anthony’s IT staff is fully trained on Dinerware’s database table structure and have reported that accessing and sharing the data is simple and will facilitate flexible integration scenarios well into the future because of Microsoft’s® SQL Server database.

·         Ray Caldwell stated that, “as an organization, we are very concerned with the accuracy of information. We spent too much time with the previous system correcting errors and the data entry was difficult to work with – the ability to have accurate information without repair has been very helpful.”

·         Dinerware has empowered Anthony’s staff and put them in control as they can now assess and complete issues on their own.