MARKHAM, Ont. — Oliver & Bonacini Hospitality (O&B) has transitioned all its restaurants, catering and entertainment venues across Canada to Silverware POS.
Silverware develops enterprise point-of-sale solutions for large venue operations and deploys systems to meet the needs of multi-revenue operations with restaurants, bars, lounges, room service, banquet and retail facilities.
A key criteria for O&B was finding a POS platform that drives efficiency. The goal of the new system was to get food out faster and send orders to the kitchen in clear, concise ways without lag time. The company also wanted a solution that its employees would be eager to engage with since most of the wait staff are young and comfortable adopting new technology.
“The demands of today’s diners are changing,” says Charlotte Newbury, associate director of Business Operations, O&B. “At high-end restaurants, people expect personalized service with a great view and a one-of-a-kind culinary adventure. At more casual places, diners may prefer to be more interactive or self-serving with their experiences. Time is precious, and therefore they don’t want to wait on service associates to pay their bills; a scan, pay and leave scenario more aptly fits their lifestyles. To support this mix – dictated by the market and the concept – we needed a point-of-sale solution that did it all. It needed to be user friendly and give us access to the back end so we could manage and maintain it on our own. Silverware has the flexibility to do all that and much more.”
Users can be trained on Silverware in about 45 minutes. In fact, 16 employees oversee, manage and provide back-end programming to Silverware across the foodservice enterprise. One of the newer features of Silverware being leveraged by O&B is GuestX for online ordering. The GuestX platform enables diners to seamlessly place orders and pay through their mobile phone by credit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. It’s fully customizable to match each restaurants’ branding and ensure a consistent experience for diners whether they eat in or order out.
“When onboarding new employees or bringing a restaurant online with Silverware, everyone is amazed at the user friendliness of the system,” says Newbury. “Most servers think ‘you’ve seen one POS, you’ve seen them all,’ but that’s not the case. Our staff consistently tell us they can’t believe how intuitive Silverware is. Anything and everything you can possibly think of is already built in. Our people say they especially like the fact that pricing levels change automatically; when lunch is over and Happy Hour begins, price changes don’t have to be input manually. Whenever Silverware asks if we would like to pilot new features, we jump at the chance to provide insight.”
The company has roughly six new restaurants coming online in 2024, plus a large food hall project this spring with 16 food stalls.
