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Secret Recipe Cakes & Cafe (Secret Recipe) is a retail food-services company in Malaysia with more than 80 caf?locations. Established in 1997, Secret Recipe is a Malaysian company that produces and markets high-quality cakes, desserts and fusion food.
Secret Recipe expanded significantly when it opened 82 moderately priced cafe, including 11 in Singapore, 4 in Jakarta and 1 in Bangkok. Based in Kuala Lumpur, Secret Recipe was built on a commitment to excellence and has become internationally well known as a leader in its industry, winning a number of worldwide culinary accolades.
Compared to five years ago, today's food industry contains many more competitors and customers who are much more particular about food selections. Secret Recipe needed to find a way to ensure that it maintained its competitive advantage in this new marketplace.
Secret Recipe's franchise cafe were using traditional cash registers to record sales transactions. This method offered limited reporting options and did not allow integration between front- and back-end systems. Employees tracked sales manually and were not able to easily retrieve accurate information, which made reporting more difficult and cumbersome.
To differentiate itself from competitors, integrate front- and back-end systems, and empower staff to become more productive and efficient, Secret Recipe wanted to deploy a new system to track sales transactions. The company began looking for a solution that would standardise its technology across multiple sites, increase overall sales and improve tracking of its franchisees' sales information.
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Retail Store Solutions: SurePOS 500 Series, Ready for IBM Retail Store Innovations validated applications:
After considering other options, Secret Recipe implemented a retail-hardened IBM point-of-sale (POS) system to record its front-end transactions. The IBM SurePOS 500 Series systems use File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to communicate with back-end systems at the company's main office. Each day, the IBM SurePOS systems send sales data to the company's Hewlett-Packard server using a Streamyx broadband connection. In many Secret Recipe outlets, wait staff use Palm personal digital assistants (PDAs) to take orders. Once an order is placed, it's immediately sent to the kitchen as well as to the payment counter.
The solution includes a POS front-end application (Waiter POS) and a handheld-device application (Waiter PAD) from IBM Business Partner i-Waiter Solutions. The i-Waiter applications are validated as "Ready for IBM Retail Store Innovations", which means that IBM has tested them and they have proven to work smoothly with all necessary IBM POS drivers and peripherals.
Secret Recipe's smaller cafe use just one POS system, while larger cafe require two. During the initial rollout, IBM implemented 30 POS systems at 25 sites. The company expects to install POS systems at more than 50 additional sites by the end of 2005.
Improving Employee Productivity
After deploying the IBM POS solution, employee productivity at Secret Recipe increased by five percent and service delivery times improved between 10 and 20 percent. Overall, the company's sales grew by approximately five percent.
Because the solution immediately routes orders to kitchen and payment terminals, Secret Recipe's wait staff has more time to spend interacting with customers. As a result, they can provide better, more personalised service. And because it's faster and easier for managers to access accurate sales information, they can focus on analyzing trends and improving caf?operations as needed.
The new POS system creates a sophisticated, professional image for Secret Recipe, and it enables employees to provide much higher levels of customer service. There are minimal billing errors with the new system, and franchisee sales figures are much simpler to track than with the previous solution.
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