The Making of India’s Largest Restaurant Management System by Digicorp
that Revolutionized the way Restaurants Operate & Interact with their Customers
Project Scope
To create a cutting-edge Point of Sale(POS) platform which would enable small to mid-size restaurants to manage their operations by leveraging technology.
Scale
Used in More Than 55,000+ Restaurant Outlets Across India, UAE, Canada, and USA. Processing 900,000+ Requests per Hour. More Than 5 Million Bills Are Generated on a Monthly Basis and 50,000+ User Hits are Generated via Various Third Party Applications.
Inception:
Duration:
Current Status:
Petpooja is a Digicorp venture. It has been handed over to the product owner with 100% client satisfaction and immense market success.
Team:
1 Principal Designer,
1 Product Designer,
1 UI-UX Designer,
1 Full Stack Developer,
1 Project Manager
The Fascinating Journey of Petpooja
Back in 2007, when online food delivery was yet to become the norm in India, a group of entrepreneurs began to toy with the idea of building a product that enables doorstep delivery of meals and beverages from local food joints. On being approached by the owners, our team worked on this project and created a market-ready product within just a few months. But soon it became apparent that due to lack of restaurant infrastructure and a shortage of professional delivery personnel, the model was crumbling. The team then shifted their focus to online food delivery for corporate institutions, but once again, we reached a dead- end as the corporate houses were keen on having their own food delivery supply chain.
From Online Food Delivery to Restaurant Management System
Gradually, as the challenges of the restaurant owners started taking the centre-stage – such as the inefficiencies of manual billing, lack of an effective order management system, lack of inventory management solutions, stock-out issues and so on – the product began to pivot towards becoming a one-stop marketplace for restaurant owners and managers to address their specific restaurant management needs in an end-to-end manner. By 2017- 2018, Petpooja had become the household name for thousands of restaurant chains in Gujarat, and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, Petpooja is India’s leading restaurant management app processing 10 million+ bills monthly, and here we share the story of how it all came into being.
User Research - Key Challenges faced by Restaurant Owners, Managers & Staff
The core idea behind Petpooja was to create a cutting- edge Point of Sale(POS) platform which would enable small to mid-size restaurants to manage their operations by leveraging technology. The client team was looking for a long-term partner to transform the vision into reality and found Digicorp as the perfect fit. The client’s sales team provided us with critical insights on the exact needs of the restaurant owners, managers and staff and these were then mapped on to the product features. Some of the key highlights from the user research included:
- Billing: It was important to reduce billing time and improve billing accuracy since effective and efficient billing is at the heart of any restaurant’s operations.
- Order Handling: Devising a digital platform to take, manage and record orders, whether on-line or in-premise was another priority area.
- Inventory Management: The restaurants needed an easy-to-use interface to manage the inventory of all the ingredients & finished items to prevent stock-out & wastage.
- Customer Feedback: It was important to enable integrated feedback management system from restaurant guests and online customers for improvement.
- Flexibility: It was necessary to ensure that each of these systems run on any desktop/handheld device and with any operating system – with/without the internet.
Our Approach - Project Planning and Implementation by Digicorp Team
Digicorp worked with Petpooja management and sales team for defining the product roadmap and conceptualizing the future developments of a POS system in India. It was a challenging product to develop from the UI-UX perspective since the end-users were often restaurant managers and staff who were not always literate or tech-savvy. We colour-coded the various sections and items for ease of handling & understanding by them.
We deployed a cross-functional dedicated development team and took an Agile approach with quick iteration at the early stages. The result was a configurable marketplace for restaurants with various interfaces and APIs that can be used by third parties (Online Ordering Portals/Apps such as FoodPanda, Swiggy, Zomato, Mobikon, Massblurb, etc.) to interact with the POS system. This enabled third parties to access restaurant menus in real- time along with order placements. Further, we also empowered restaurant managers to leverage advanced technologies like enabling the self-booking of orders on-premise through kiosks without any supervision and apps to manage customer queues.
Today, Petpooja provides a full stack POS platform by leveraging technology by integrating third party vendors for the restaurateurs in order to ease their operations and scale up their business. A host of useful APIs that have been developed for use by restaurants and third parties to provide seamless integration with the Petooja POS includes:
- Payment Infrastructure: Integrates with banks using the EDC machine.
- Wallet Payment Acceptance: Integrates with India’s largest e-wallet payment provider (Paytm) to accept payment from Petpooja POS in offline space (without OTP).
- Online Order Management: We created a web-based solution which syncs with Phone/Tablet/Desktop based devices to capture the orders and pass them seamlessly to the POS system.
- Online Tenderer: Integrates with various tenderers to help restaurant owners secure quick loans with the help of digitized invoices and financial statements.
- Website & Apps for Restaurants: Integrates with various zero-coding app/website services enabling restaurants to go online and establish a digital presence.
- Online Delivery Systems: Integrates with various delivery service providers (Runnr, Grab, Parsel, Jugnoo, etc.) and redirects the orders straight to the POS system.
Technologies Deployed
The key technologies that we used for Product Development, UI & UX Design, Website Design & Development and Branding were CakePHP, MySQL, WordPress and Bootstrap3.
CakePHP
MySQL
Wordpress
Bootstrap3
Concluding Note
Today, PetPooja is being used in more than 55,000 restaurant outlets across India, processing 900,000+ requests per hour. More than 5 million bills are generated on a monthly basis and 50,000+ user hits are generated via various third party applications. Digicorp is proud and humbled to have created a marketplace for third party apps allowing restaurant owners to plug and play solutions which suit their business needs. More importantly, the beauty of this all-in-one restaurant management system is that it can be easily replicated to other domains (e.g. Retail) with minimal modifications.