in favor of a tech education and career. (“I just realized I was a sitting duck with a big bull’s eye on my back,” Velcea says.)
Restaurants and retail stores aren’t exactly the earliest adopters of new technologies. But that’s where Beauregard’s past experience pays off. He started washing dishes at age 14, and worked at places like Freestones City Grill, The Back Eddy, and Abercrombie & Fitch to put himself through college. So he has seen the pain points from the inside. He talks about “busting my rear end in a full restaurant” and seeing two or three other waitstaff slacking off and talking about weekend plans while he was “serving martinis and making a lot of money for the restaurant.”
Most people can relate to that experience; the question is whether managers are willing to do much about it. It’s early, but so far the answer seems to be yes. Restaurant owners say, “We’ve been doing this in our heads for the past 20 years,” Beauregard says.
That’s because only recently could such a point-of-sale (POS) technology even exist, he says. In restaurants, POS systems are the touch-screen computers on which waiters enter orders and process payments. They keep track of who sold what to whom, when, at which table, and so forth. The resulting databases are “the dirtiest and most disgusting things you could see on Earth,” Beauregard says. “The restaurant industry has been so reticent and slow to adopt new technology until just recently. We were lucky in our timing.”
Objective Logistics’ software-as-a-service, called MUSE, roots through all of that data, pulls out performance metrics (like who sold the most drinks that week), ranks each worker, and displays the metrics for the manager, who can then drill down into the various records. Meanwhile, workers input the hours they’re available to work and their preferred times. They can also see how they rank every week, and what they need to do to improve.
The payoff: Objective Logistics forecasts that this system will increase customer sales by 2-4 percent overall. It will also save managers somewhere in the ballpark of 10 hours a week in administrative duties, Beauregard says.
Those improvements are key, because surely some workers will not want their boss to know their every move—or will disagree with the metrics. Beauregard predicts that employees will be split about 70-30 in favor of adopting the new system. On a recent visit to a store in Beverly, MA, he was explaining how the software works, and one staffer burst into tears, while half a dozen others had smiles on their faces, he says. He also predicts increased attrition rates, because stores will be able to root out their low-performing employees more quickly (or they’ll quit).
It’s certainly not for everyone. Besides “the mean girls who’ve been there 20 years,” Beauregard says, mom-and-pop stores that have employed the same waitress for a decade won’t want to use the software. He admits the technology will be “culture shock” for some people in the business.
But if the company can overcome the backlash from some workers (and presumably unions)—as well as inertia in the industry—and prove to store owners that its software boosts sales and workers’ performance, it should have a bright future. What’s more, its ideas just might leak into other work environments besides service industries and retail.
“A good portion of your life is at your job,” Beauregard says. “We want to create transparency there.”
