Gondola Group Limited
Gondola Group is the leading UK casual dining group operating PizzaExpress, ASK and Zizzi together with a number of smaller brands. The Group serves over 36 million meals a year in over 560 restaurants. Gondola's restaurants are positioned to offer a great eating out experience which provides value for money. Gondola's three distinct main brands, Pizza Express, Ask and Zizzi have broad customer appeal, and lend themselves to different dining occasions.
Gondola recently introduced a new Electronic Point of Sale (EPoS) system to their leading PizzaExpress brand with the aim of improving revenue management and stock control. Core to this process is an understanding of the food cost with detailed analysis of individual ingredient yields which was not available through their chosen EPoS provider. Gondola charged their new EPoS provider with suggesting a solution and the first choice option was StarChef.NET because of its rich functionality and known ability to interface easily with other systems. Gondola had also identified at this point that they would, in the medium term, require nutritional analysis of their recipes and StarChef.NET would provide that opportunity at the same time.
An established company such as PizzaExpress comes with many business processes already in place and invariably these are needed to integrate and work seamlessly with any new system introduced. Gondola appointed a project manager to oversee the integration. By spending time with the project manager, Star Logic was able to gain a clear understanding of the business needs and existing processes and draw up plans to identify how StarChef would meet the needs or indeed to identify gaps between the system and the reality. An initial implementation would be relatively straightforward, but this was to be followed by an intensive round of development to add specific requirements of PizzaExpress to StarChef.NET. The timescales would be short, but would have to be achieved to ensure a go live could be coordinated with the launch of the new EPoS.
The final solution would be an enhanced version of StarChef.NET introducing new features that would allow existing practices to be followed and new procedures to be introduced. Delivered early and within budget, the enhanced solution met all requirements. Key to these requirements was the need to export critical data from StarChef to the new EPoS system provided by Torex.
The requirement for a stable, comprehensive and feature rich system, providing information to Torex via a number of interfaces has been met by Star Logic through its StarChef.NET program and this is now becoming a critical tool within the PizzaExpress business. Most importantly though was the ability to cost recipes accurately and easily. Confidence in a system is critical to its success and PizzaExpress has declared a level of confidence in both the system operation and the levels of support provided by Star Logic in addressing needs and requirements.
