Pizza Factory is consolidating much of its restaurant technology under a single provider, a move designed to give the pizza chain a clearer view of operations across its franchised and corporate locations.
Founded in 1979 and headquartered in Oakhurst, California, Pizza Factory has 108 franchised restaurants and two corporate-owned locations.
The California-based brand has selected a suite of products from PAR Technology covering point of sale, digital ordering, hardware, loyalty, labor, inventory and other operational functions. Pizza Factory will also renew its use of PAR’s Punchh loyalty platform.
Pizza Factory CEO Lisa Roscoe said the connected platform should help the company improve execution across its locations.
“Delivering a great pizza experience depends on strong execution at every location,” Roscoe said. “PAR gives us a unified platform across POS, loyalty, operations and payments, along with the insight our teams need to make smarter decisions every day. This sets us up to run more efficiently while continuing to invest in the guest experience.”
PAR Technology CEO Savneet Singh added, “When front- and back-of-house systems work together, restaurants gain the clarity and control they need to operate at their best—both in terms of driving same-store sales and protecting margins.”
For a multi-unit brand, bringing POS, online ordering, loyalty, labor and inventory data into the same system can reduce the amount of information that employees must transfer manually between programs. It can also make it easier for company leaders and franchisees to compare sales, labor costs, inventory usage and other performance measures across locations.
Pizza Factory expects the platform to help its restaurants plan labor and inventory using current operating data, improve order accuracy across ordering channels and use purchasing and loyalty data to personalize guest communications.
A pizzeria doesn’t necessarily need to purchase every product from the same technology company. But systems that cannot exchange information can create duplicate work, reporting gaps and conflicting numbers.
Before adding another piece of restaurant technology, operators should ask whether it integrates with their existing POS, online ordering, loyalty and accounting systems. They should also determine who owns the restaurant’s data and how easily that data can be exported if the business later changes vendors.
Consolidating vendors can simplify training, support and reporting, but it also makes the restaurant more dependent on a single provider. Operators should weigh the convenience of an integrated platform against contract terms, total costs and the difficulty of replacing individual components that do not perform as expected.
