The Making of India’s Largest Restaurant Management System by Digicorp

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.

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:

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:

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.