Bringing data-driven management to complex, fast-paced environments
Executive Summary
Restaurants, like many industries, are data-rich environments that often do not have the tools or technologies to gather and mine the value from this data. Fast food chain automation is changing how restaurants calculate and manage costs on a daily basis. ARDIC's IoT-Ignite* analytics solution combines with Intel® technologies to gather, filter, and analyze key variables to automate operations in fast-moving environments. For restaurants, benefits include reduced waste, insight into customer behaviour, and operational efficiency—with positive impact on the bottom line.
Challenges
Over 40 percent of food produced globally is wasted every year.1 2 Fast food restaurants face particular challenges with costly waste, operational inefficiencies, and food safety. In order to deliver food quickly, it must be prepared in advance of customer orders, even though daily foot traffic is unpredictable. Consistency of product is essential, and this requires accurate measurement and temperature control, but managers often have little insight into the variables of equipment and staff activity throughout the day. Fast food operations need solutions that can scale across multiple locations and geographies, and holistic insight into growth challenges and opportunities than a three-fold increase in the amount of road and rail freight.
Solution
ARDIC's IoT-Ignite platform running on Intel® architecture-based gateways is helping fast food companies better monitor food production and quality to improve customer experiences, increase operational efficiency, and minimize waste.
The innovative solution adapts a range of technologies to the specific requirements of the restaurant industry. Nonintrusive sensors and RFID tags collect and generate information relevant to different services. Smart scales and level counters add to the data pool. All data is gathered, filtered, and processed on a single Intel architecture-based gateway. Data parameters are determined in conjunction with the restaurant to ensure relevance.
Management is localized to each venue. For example, the solution automatically sends alerts when waste exceeds a certain amount, occupancy and consumption trends change, kitchen conditions alter, the restaurant is out of stock, or there are items that are close to expiration in the cold room.
ARDIC and Intel bring smart, near-real-time decision-making customized for the restaurant industry
ARDIC is piloting the solution at an expanding number of a leading fast food franchise's restaurants in Turkey. RFID tags and readers, sensors, and smart cameras transmit data to the gateway where it is mined for actionable edge intelligence and/or transmitted to the cloud for deeper analytics. Capabilities include counting customers, tracking the customer journey through the experience (e.g., wait times, peak cycles), tracking goods and inventory, and managing weight and environmental variables such as temperature and humidity. The solution includes smart scales for calculating food weight, a smart trash can that computes waste and unsold burgers, and a level counter that informs kitchen staff about changing occupancy levels, so they can adjust food production accordingly.
To maintain quality, the fast food restaurant's staff must dispose of burgers not sold within 15 minutes. With the smart solution, food production is based on data, decreasing waste, and potentially saving millions of dollars globally each day.
The open IoT-Ignite platform from ARDIC allows applications and features to be easily added or modified. The entire solution is highly automated, works with the existing franchise infrastructure, and does not disrupt ongoing operations.
With ARDIC, the fast food franchise is gathering more data each day and mining it to realize its full value—with resulting increases in system efficiency. As the solution is deployed in more venues, cross-store data informs refinements and the opportunity for global deployment. As operations are standardized, they can be optimized and managed more efficiently.
Key Benefits
ARDIC's IoT-Ignite and Intel architecture-based gateways support a wide range of benefits, including stock optimization, loss prevention, and lower OpEx. ARDIC works closely with its customers and their field operations to ensure analytics are pertinent, actionable, and meet business objectives.
- Optimize operations with great accuracy to maximize efficiency and help increase profits
- Compare metrics between restaurants to fine-tune optimisations and create best practices for use in existing and future franchises
- Easily identify which restaurants are underperforming and adjust the number of employees per location
- Minimise time-consuming tasks like daily counts and bookkeeping, increasing employee efficiency
- Detect abnormal activities (high customer count with low sales, high waste levels, etc.) and respond immediately to address issues
- Keep current with fast food automation technology and gain a competitive advantage
With ARDIC’s IoT-Ignite* platform combined with the Intel®architecture-based gateway, restaurants get the data to improve quality, customer service, and efficiency
Sample Use Cases for the Restaurant Industry
Inventory management
- Dynamically track inventory or assets on the cloud with no manual intervention using RIFD technology
- Track the amount of inventory that the restaurant must maintain
- Raise flags or place orders at critical levels
- Eliminate daily inventory counts
- Track and reduce loss
- Minimize human intervention and errors
- Access reportage on daily and hourly business fluctuations
Queue management
- Identify customer behaviour and rush hours to take action (e.g., open a new cashier to avoid long queues, optimise back-end operations)
- Control crowds with customer queuing system
- Count people entering the line during a specific time period
- Count approximate number of people standing in the line
- Track customer's journey in the store, such as waiting in line or leaving
- Manage the number of cashiers with a predefined logic
- Generate data for labor/staff allocation
Smart waste
- Track dumped precooked, cooked, and unsold food with near-real-time inventory tracking service
- Monitor abnormal dumps
- Generate average dump levels for future evaluations
- Compare daily sold food with outgoing items from the stock room and the smart waste bin
More use cases
IoT-Ignite is an open IoT platform. Companies of any size can utilize IoT-Ignite to design, develop, and deploy their own IoT services and rapidly start monetization.
Today, IoT-Ignite enables services for a wide range of vertical market segments including retail, mobile services, agriculture, education, and energy. The opportunities to extend services to healthcare, manufacturing, and mobility are wide open.
The flexible, easy-to-deploy smart solution provides relevant data for optimisation of connected industries
How It Works in Brief
The IoT-Ignite solution executes processing and filtering of data within the Intel architecture-based smart gateway and forwards pertinent data to an IoT-Ignite cloud. An RFID reader developed by Intel® Labs, smart scales, and smart cameras contribute meaningful data from throughout the restaurant venue.
RFID tags
are put on boxes of materials before leaving the distribution center. The boxes can be tracked in the distribution center, freezer room, and kitchen of the restaurant. Headquarters can see how many boxes are left in each branch and make sure that each type of goods is stored at its correct temperature.
Cameras
are used for queue management. Displays in the kitchen show a number from one to seven. If queues are long, this number is increased and staff in the kitchen can quickly respond.
The ARDIC cloud platform includes a service and Wi-Fi layer, and runs algorithms built by ARDIC to meet the specified goals of the deployment.
The ARDIC IoT Ignite service enables fast IoT solution deployment for IoT service providers. The Intel architecture-based gateways help enable end-to-end security, networking, and interoperability. An Android* operating system supports easy customization. A vertical application store provides customers with access to apps and data on any device from any location, enabling flexible, user-friendly, and, most importantly, rapidly deployable services for any market segment.
The Foundation for IoT
The ARDIC solution is just one example of how Intel works closely with the IoT ecosystem to help enable smart Internet of Things (IoT) solutions based on standardized, scalable, reliable Intel® architecture and software. These solutions range from sensors and gateways to server and cloud technologies to data analytics algorithms and applications. Intel provides essential end-to-end capabilities— performance, manageability, connectivity, analytics, and advanced security—to help accelerate innovation and increase revenue for enterprises, service providers, and the restaurant industry.
Conclusion
Fast food restaurants offer a great example of the challenges of managing a fast-paced environment with numerous dynamic variables. With ARDIC and Intel, restaurants, along with many other industries, can improve decisionmaking and operational efficiency based on accurate, near-real-time data generated by on-site, undisruptive technologies—from sensors and cameras to RFID tags and readers and smart gateways. ARDIC closely collaborates with its customers to ensure its solutions powered by Intel® technology meet evolving requirements and generate useful, actionable data.
Learn More
For more information about ARDIC solutions for the food industry, please visit iot-ignite.com/fast-food-automation or contact us at info@iot-ignite.com.
To learn more about ARDIC, visit ardictech.com.
For more information about Intel® IoT Technology and the Intel® IoT Solutions Alliance, please visit intel.com/iot.
References
1. Precision Agriculture, IBM Research
2. Connected Life: The Impact of the Connected Life Over the Next Five Years, GSMA, Feb-2013, PDF
Estimated results were obtained prior to implementation of recent software patches and firmware updates intended to address exploits referred to as “Spectre” and “Meltdown”. Implementation of these updates may make these results inapplicable to your device or system.
Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products. For more information go to www.intel.com/benchmarks.
Intel technologies’ features and benefits depend on system configuration and may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. Performance varies depending on system configuration. No computer system can be absolutely secure. Check with your system manufacturer or retailer or learn more at intel.com/iot. Cost reduction scenarios described are intended as examples of how a given Intel-based product, in the specified circumstances and configurations, may affect future costs and provide cost savings. Circumstances will vary. Intel does not guarantee any costs or cost reduction.