CASE STUDY: BUILD YOUR OWN TECHNOLOGY
NextChoice and BYO aggregate kitchens to supercharge online restaurant ordering. Sales rise 200% in six months.
THE COMPANY
Started in 2003, Build Your Own Technology (BYO) is a Pennsylvania-based “virtual restaurant” powered by the NextChoice™ Intelligent Self-service System. BYO takes the whole concept of a menu-based restaurant and turns it on its head. There is no restaurant menu—or even a restaurant, per se. Instead, customers go online and browse through foods, selecting what they want to eat in much the same way they might browse through their own kitchen. But unlike their kitchen, BYO always has hundreds of items available, allowing customers to build their own meals. Once the choices are made and the order is placed and paid for online, BYO will select a traditional bricks and mortar restaurant with kitchen and delivery capacity and then pay them to build the meal and deliver that food order.
BYO is the outgrowth of an earlier venture formed by four Penn State college students. The original company took all the menus from restaurants near the Penn State campus and placed them online—allowing students and professors to place orders for a given restaurant over the Internet. This original venture was so successful it now operates at nine other college campuses around the country. When NextChoice developed the first centrally managed online self-service ordering solution that could integrate with a restaurant’s POS, the students realized they could develop a revolutionary way of providing meals to people and BYO was born.
THE SOLUTION
Until now, online menus have been vertical, meaning the menu, customer order and restaurant are inexorably linked. With the introduction of the NextChoice NextWeb™ Internet Ordering solution, the traditional components of restaurant ordering can be "de-linked". Customers can now decide what foods they want to order instead of which menu they want to order from. At the same time, BYO abandons the idea of having to own a bricks & mortar restaurant. Instead, they can aggregate the ability of restaurants to provide meals in a given area. The result? A much larger variety of foods from one provider, and the production capability that comes from aggregating kitchen capacity and a greatly expanded delivery network of many restaurants.
The challenge for BYO was to completely automate the process—from order fulfillment and online customer payment, to restaurant POS integration. At the same time BYO had to centralize management and automate many aspects of administration such as payment to restaurants, software updating, customer tracking, item pricing and promotion.
BYO management knew that traditional or, first generation, online ordering solutions would never fit the bill because they simply convert Internet orders to faxes that get sent to the restaurant. From that point forward, with first generation online ordering software, the order and payment are processed by manually key stroking it into the POS.
Reporting, pricing and menu changes also must be entered and updated manually with first generation online software.
Because BYO utilizes NextChoice NextWeb—a third generation online ordering solution—which fully integrates with the POS of one restaurant or a thousand restaurants, BYO doesn’t have to worry about restaurants key stroking orders, receiving orders for items they’re out of, or manually making changes to their online ordering system to match their POS. NextChoice also lets BYO receive online catering orders, days, weeks or even months ahead of time, because NextWeb automatically enters the order into a selected restaurant’s POS so it will show up on the kitchen video screen for fulfillment at the right time.
THE RESULTS
In the past six months, BYO has streamlined its ordering and payment process with the result that online orders have grown by 200 percent. Thanks to its success and the ability of the NextChoice Intelligent Self-service solution to be managed centrally while also quickly and easily expanding into new locations, BYO is currently scouting new locations at college campuses throughout the U.S..
