Delivery is easily the fastest growing part of many restaurants’ business. Industrywide, delivery has grown 20 percent over the last five years and are projected to rise to 40 percent or more of all restaurant sales, according to NPD Group and Morgan Stanley.

Services such as GrubHub and Uber Eats account for a lot of that growth, driving revenue while also biting deeply into restaurant margins. Tools such as restaurant tablets, smartphones and mobile device management (MDM) may be restaurants’ best weapons to fight back by making it easy to manage their own delivery services.

Choose Your Technology

Restaurants such as NYC’s Mulberry and Wine attribute a one-third decline in profitability to third-party delivery platforms and couriers that take 20 to 40 percent of the revenue from an order, according to The New Yorker. While that healthy food eatery gave up on running its own delivery service due to the complexity, restaurants can make delivery manageable with the right technology solutions. The ideal combination includes:

• Delivery management software, which is available separately or as an add-on to POS, and MDM software to configure, secure and manage devices
• In-store technology such as ruggedized tablets to display delivery management dashboards
• Driver devices such as smartphones or ruggedized tablets

Together, these technologies make it simple and cost-effective to manage delivery in-house, preserve margin and ensure a better customer delivery experience.

Leveraging Mobile Device Management

Streamlined, rugged devices are essential to effectively dispatching, routing and transacting delivery orders, while meeting the demands of food dispatch and delivery. Keeping those devices up-to-date and working well is a must to meet rigorous delivery demands. That’s the job of an MDM or enterprise mobile management (EMM) solution, which maximizes the value of a restaurant’s investment in mobile devices for delivery and other functions.

A well-designed EMM solution, such as Samsung Knox Manage or Samsung MDM/EMM partners including Airwatch, BlackBerry and MobileIron, provides a variety of indispensable services, such as:

• Keeping devices running at peak performance by automatically pushing out operating system patches, new app versions and other updates, regardless of which OS they run
• Reducing support costs, since updated devices are less likely to experience problems
• Facilitating remote support, and if a device is reported lost or stolen, remotely locating, locking, rebooting and/or wiping its content as necessary
• Tracking the location of devices via GPS — helpful for monitoring the location of the delivery fleet
• Enabling operators to implement policies for how the devices may and may not be used, such as whitelisting and blocklisting apps and websites, preventing use of the camera, and restricting device use to specific purposes — even customizing policies to specific situations

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An MDM/EMM solution can be used to manage all restaurant-owned mobile devices. For employee-owned devices used for delivery functions, containerization capabilities such as Knox Platform for Enterprise enable IT oversight and control of the delivery partition, while leaving employees free to use the rest of the phone as they wish. These solutions also include app development and management options, ensuring employees have one-stop access to all the resources they need to facilitate efficient, satisfying customer service.

Restaurants can also take advantage of other, complementary Samsung Knox solutions that make it easier to manage mobile devices, such as Knox Configure, to remotely set up each mobile device, and Knox Mobile Enrollment to easily link each device to the MDM/EMM software.

Reclaiming Delivery

Consumers clearly have an appetite for having their favorite restaurant meals delivered to their home and office — a market currently fueled by the emergence of third-party delivery services. But after the restaurant has won over that new customer, there’s no reason to keep giving margin away in delivery fees. Thanks to powerful, easy-to-use tools such as delivery dispatch software, tablets, smartphones and mobile device management, restaurants can take back delivery business, control the customer experience and watch their revenues grow.

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