When executing a restaurant IT deployment, consistency, timeliness, and successful execution are key. When doing so at scale (for example, if you’re rolling out some new QSR tech across an entire region or national chain of restaurants), there’s immense value in having end-to-end support.
From the planning and purchasing phase to the last-mile delivery and installation, any number of issues can frustrate or derail a deployment.
Project coordinators are a proven way to bring order to the chaos. At a high level, they bring consistent, end-to-end support to a particular deployment initiative or to specific site deployments. They provide the necessary framework to help disparate, distributed teams and contractors stay on task and on schedule.
Check out six ways a project coordinator can streamline your restaurant IT deployment.
6 Benefits of Outsourcing an IT Project Coordinator
Sourcing, Vetting & Assigning Techs
When you’re working with a restaurant group with a large national or multinational footprint, sourcing techs in every possible location becomes a highly complex endeavor. Project coordinators keep this complexity off your plate. They take care of not just sourcing techs, but also vetting these contingent workers and assigning them to job sites in an organized, documentable fashion.
With a field services management system like Dispatch1®, project coordinators have a place to document and catalog this work, too, giving them a much better data set to work from no matter the scale of the end client.
Maintaining a List of Vetted Techs for Future Job Deployments
It’s one thing to get the right techs to the right locations. But it’s quite another to do this consistently for years, with no gaps or dropped balls.
A project coordinator can help your organization keep up by maintaining a list of vetted techs for future job deployments. The longer you work with a channel partner (and a dedicated project coordinator), the better the database of local deployment techs becomes.
Briefing Techs Before They Arrive On Site
One of the challenges with QSR tech and restaurant IT deployments is getting consistent messaging out to far-flung installation sites, as well as dealing with the inevitable differences and unique scenarios that pop up from site to site.
A well-informed project coordinator can be the key to solving this communication problem. It becomes the project coordinator’s job to brief techs on what they should expect at the restaurant IT deployment site before they arrive.
Project coordinators become the on-paper experts, knowing and communicating what needs to happen and what might be different in any given installation.
Conducting Pre-Check Calls
The risk of outsourcing your deployment and installation needs is that those local, last-mile techs may not live up to your brand standards or even show up on time. The vetting we’ve already mentioned is a part of this, but project coordinators can help in further ways to ensure timeliness.
A project coordinator can mitigate the risk of no-shows or dropped communication by conducting pre-check calls at both 24-hours and one-hour prior to dispatch to make sure the local tech is still on schedule and properly briefed.
If there’s a problem or a delay, the project coordinator can notify the restaurant and negotiate a new timetable.
Purchasing & Scheduling Needed Equipment
Some deployment scenarios are simple, requiring only the tools that a deployment partner would already have on hand. But others are more complex, requiring logistics coordination.
One example is coordinating a crane lift. If you need to fit and place large digital menu boards, a crane might be necessary.
Of course, you don’t want to leave this for your deployment partner to discover when they arrive on site. Offloading this task to a project coordinator is the way to ensure the rented equipment gets paid for and delivered to the right location at the right time.
Referring, Resolving, or Escalating Problems
Restaurant IT-managed service providers have plenty to worry about. Fielding multiple messages (often with varying degrees of clarity) can get in the way of other responsibilities, so the smart move is to route these to a project coordinator.
Your project coordinator can field these messages, requests, and concerns and filter them appropriately. Some of these the project coordinator can resolve independently. Others need to be referred out or escalated to the managed service provider.
By putting these decisions into the hands of a dedicated resource who knows who should take care of what, you’ll decrease wasted time and resources, increase efficiency, and see better outcomes overall.
Kinettix Is Your Restaurant IT Deployment Partner
Kinettix utilizes project coordinators for its IT deployment efforts, keeping technology deployments and the personnel involved organized, on track, and on time. Through the Dispatch1® field services platform, our project managers can quickly manage incoming requests and dispatch resources efficiently.
Curious to see more? Contact us today to see how we can solve your business needs.
