Phil Crawford, chief information officer for the 28-unit Yard House Restaurants casual-dining chain in Irvine, Calif., cites the creation of the back-end system for the fund-raising initiative Round It Up America as one of his company’s significant technology achievements of the past two years.
Round It Up America, launched by Yard House president Harald Herrmann and Jennifer Weerheim, the company’s vice president of marketing, raised more than $250,000 in less than a year for Southern California and other area charities and non-profit organizations.
Yard House asked guests to “round up” their dining checks to the nearest dollar and donate the remaining change to local charities — an act that required some technology maneuvering by Crawford and his Yard House information technology team.
Round It Up America last month held its inaugural granting ceremony, handing out checks of $10,000 apiece to eight recipient organizations.
Crawford recently spoke to NRN.com about Round it up America and Yard House technology news and strategies. An edited version of that conversation follows.
What were the technology requirements of Round It Up America?
There were two. One was the ability to interface with the POS system so an additional line can be added to the credit-card voucher so a guest can leave an additional amount, above a tip. The second was the ability to interface with the credit-card processor and POS system to treat the donation as a separate transaction for reconciliation, yet retain the original card information when first swiped by the guest so a rerun wouldn't be required.
What are some of the other key IT changes that have taken place
at your company during the past two years?
Implementation of a paperless human resources [management] system; redevelopment of [our] website with ties to mobile applications; [and development of] a virtual machine environment.
What are two of your company’s IT projects in progress and what prompted them?
“Colo” [or co-located IT systems] expansion, [which] stemmed from overall growth and additional requirements for space and resources. Further advancement of internal intranet applications to facilitate communication among stores, regionals [facilities or personnel] and the corporate office.
How does your department get involved, if at all, with the social media initiatives of the marketing group?
We work hand-in-hand with marketing on social media products, whether it be about development or updates to existing social media initiatives — Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, MySpace — or to assist in constructing promotions that take advantage of new technologies, such as Q technology and Microsoft Tag.
What do you consider the most exciting emerging technology with a foodservice application? Why?
I believe handheld technology and pay-at-the-table is the most emerging. We are just now catching up with the European community for this type of technology, and its return on investment has been well proven, [not only] from a speed-of-service standpoint, but also from perspectives of cost of credit-card and PIN [debit] transactions [and] security of cardholder data.
Contact Alan J. Liddle at [email protected].