Last October, Toledo, Ohio-based franchise, Marco’s Pizza, rolled out an all-in-one, in-house tech stack, Marco’s order management system (MOMS), to its franchisees, becoming the latest restaurant company to opt out of off-the-shelf tech options in favor of custom-built technology.
The new cloud-based tech stack was built by in-house developers and software engineers and has allowed Marco’s to completely drop all external tech vendor partnerships. MOMS includes a POS system, labor scheduling, inventory management, and real-time dashboards so franchisees and store employees can see what’s going on in real-time.
“When you have your own proprietary system, you're able to do things to it that you couldn't do with an off the shelf type of technology,” Milton Molina, vice president of store technology for Marco’s Pizza said. “We realized we need to be in the driver's seat, and, do the customizations that our franchisees and our customers demand. Ultimately, besides customization it’s about, ‘how quickly can we get to market?’ and ‘how quickly can we pivot?’”
For example, Molina said that with a traditional POS system, an order comes into the store and takes several seconds for it to show up in the kitchen, so with a custom system, it’s all automated and shows up much quicker. Other improvements the company was able to make with the custom tech stack include a labor scheduler built specifically for the pizza franchising industry and a food cost management module, which allows Marco’s to pinpoint where its inventory is at any point.
Molina said that one of the biggest challenges of building a tech stack in-house with your own team of developers and engineers, is dealing with time scarcity. Developing a custom system necessary takes time, and it can often be a longer process than they’d like to make changes to the tech stack or add on new elements – time that a restaurant company (which juggles many priorities) doesn’t always have.
But for Molina, the good outweighs the bad, and the technology team is already thinking about new tech features for the future including adding voice AI ordering and ordering through virtual assistants like Google and Siri. Marco’s Pizza will also look into automotive app integration with Apple Car Play just to broaden the horizons of how and when customers can order a Marco’s pizza.
“MOMS is entirely ours, and that’s the way that we plan on keeping it for the foreseeable future,” Molina said. “The beautiful thing about this system is that if there's something out there that becomes a trend and something that that we need, we can very easily add it on or plug it into our system.”
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