News Details

Do restaurants need to address Digital Transformation Initiative?

2022/04/19

Digital transformation (DX) is advancing rapidly across all industries, partly due to the Corona disaster. Many restaurants in the food and beverage industry are actively adopting DX, but there may be some that are not familiar with the term itself or have not yet implemented DX initiatives. Let's explain these questions together.
1. What is digital transformation (DX)
「Companies responding to rapid changes in the business environment and using data and digital technology to transform their products, services and business models based on the needs of customers and society, as well as transforming their operations themselves, their organisation, processes, corporate culture and climate to establish competitive advantage.」

Reading all this, it may seem like a very hard thing to do and it may be difficult to visualise. Some examples of DX in restaurants are given below.

  • The introduction of web-based booking has increased convenience and shops have been able to focus more on customer service, with fewer phone calls to be answered.
  • Digitisation of the reservation and customer ledgers has enabled data analysis, which has helped to refine the strategy
  • The introduction of mobile ordering enabled non-contact ordering and reduced the number of hall staff, eliminating the problem of staff shortages.

2. What is the purpose of restaurants considering DX?

Specific reasons for the Digital Transformation initiative included, in relation to operational efficiency, 'to respond to the serious shortage of human resources in restaurants' and 'because short of staff and need to improve back-office productivity', and in relation to customer numbers, 'to attract a wider customer base due to the decline in customer numbers caused by the Corona disaster', with the aim of broadening the customer base. The aim of the project was to broaden the customer base.

3. Restaurants should work on Digital Transformatiom?

But the reality, it is still challenge for business to shift for Digital Transformation.

Elder group and small business are not included well

Most old local store business owner are from older generation, so there is gap for exposure to technology. It still a challenge to make the technology to be user-friendly so they can adapt. The cost also need to be effecient because small business don't have huge budget allocation to try new things.

DX is essential for the future.

In DX, Asian countries like Malaysia is sometimes said to be "behind the world", but in fact, whether we look at the BtoC web services market or the BtoB packaged systems market, advanced foreign companies are increasing their presence in the Malaysian market.