While the facility management and services segments are moving on to the digital platform, almost 99% of them are still trying to make out how to actually implement these processes. Clean India Journal speaks to facility heads and app developer, Tabrez Shaikh, Senior Director, Enterprise Sales, Zeta Express, to understand a simple operation of digitising the food outlet/ cafeteria in a corporate facility.
While the facility management and services segments are moving on to the digital platform, almost 99% of them are still trying to make out how to actually implement these processes. Clean India Journal speaks to facility heads and app developer to understand a simple operation of digitising the food outlet/cafeteria in a corporate facility.
Most corporate houses have single or multiple eateries and cafeterias for their employees at different levels. Many have selfservice zones where employees help themselves with the available brewing machines. However, when it comes to employees ordering a cup of coffee or a snack of their choice, it entails a series of processes – from receiving the order, preparing it, packing, delivering, receiving payment, recording, etc., at the cafeteria end. Nonchalantly missing out on recording any of these processes, could lead to damages/ miscalculation.
Lately, the apps rage has caught up and become a handy plus easy option to process every process, and at the same time obtain records seamlessly. How do these apps help a facility manager?
According to Tabrez, “Food and Beverages is one of the biggest utility services that a company provides to its employees and it is imperative that the delivery of these services should be cost and time effective for the company, along with giving superior experience to employees while ordering and paying, avoiding long queues and ensuring the cafeteria service provider also has complete control on its operations.”
Zeta Express is a smartphonebased meal ordering and payment solution that is revolutionizing the corporate cafeteria space. With Express, employees can place an order from the convenience of their desks using the Zeta app within seconds, thereby enabling an efficient meal ordering experience. Facility Managers can pull out information on employee purchase behaviour, vendor ratings and performance, settlement reports and even draw comparisons amongst various cafeterias across office locations for overall performance through the dashboard provided by Express. For vendors operating in a cafeteria, they can get insights into top selling items, along with item consumption reports to better manage their inventory and hence avoid wastage. With clear and defined reports to vendors, it also gives accurate information about their daily sales, reducing pilferage.
Speaking about the advantages of the app, a Cisco official says that the problems faced before Zeta were reconciliation challenges for vendors. Users were tired of long queues and wait time just to place an order. Post Zeta Express deployment, they got several benefits like smooth payments, no queues in the cafeteria, more productive hours for employees and superior employee experience, advanced analytics tool to help analyze the cafeteria performance and improved cash flow for vendors.
Apps can definitely be customised, however, what kind of customisation does a facility manager opt for? There are times when Facility Managers ask for customizations to serve a purpose in their workplace. Customizations can be in the form of getting insights from the cafeteria, or for a specific functionality in the app to be available. Zeta Express takes the requirement and work backwards to present relevant solutions which can help the FMs. For a very large IT company, we presented Heat Maps, which are basically transaction focused monitoring in the cafeterias which helped the corporate understand the peak times and thereby use this to streamline their seating, cooling and backend operations in the cafeteria. For some FMs, we have integrated our app with the company’s vending machine service provider to give more employee choice whereby they can use our app on the respective vending machine for payments. For several FMs, we also enable their food subsidy program requirements through our app to give them meal consumption reports for better accountability.
Apps being so common, each corporate house has systems installed for facility managers driven by Cloudbased applications. Integrating this app with the existing systems could be a challenge. “There is a trend in the market towards integrated offering i.e having one single app for FM. We don’t see a large number of queries or request towards this. However, in such cases, our apps can be shared and we would be keen to work with corporates to jointly offer a unified experience”, said Shaikh.
Ankur Chibber, Chief Manager- 
Management Services, SBI Life says, “Express helped us in digitizing our paper-based vouchers for our own internal meal program that actually was a pain point for all the stakeholders; be it employee, admin, cafeteria vendor. We are delighted to have Zeta Express solution for cafeteria spending as it is superfast, convenient and faster than any other mode of payments. It enhances the overall user experience, saves productive hours for employees, the corporate dashboard is useful for express insights and digital reports”.
