Ensuring that your store runs smoothly takes a lot of expertise and effort. Smart operators obsessively look to improve speed of service, which explains the plethora of efficiency metrics that are meticulously reviewed every single day. But even with such dedication to refining operational efficiency, a dynamic business like a drive thru or a carwash will inevitably have ‘fires’ to put out, throughout the day. Mechanical issues, employee mishaps, and incorrect demand forecasting are just a few of the many ways in which your store could see long lines and unhappy customers. And what if you have to keep an eye on more than one store — across several states, with varying regulations, time zones and different visitor patterns? …
As businesses scramble to reopen and readjust in 2020, there’s been a heavy emphasis on minimizing the number of employees required to run the day-to-day operations. Not only does having more employees mean greater health risks, but also labor accounts for the highest percentage of operational costs in many service businesses. While the onset of COVID-19 has certainly accelerated this movement, the obsession with doing more with less dates back to the pre-pandemic era. …
For many businesses, throughput is a key performance metric that is constantly looked at, evaluated and tinkered with. At its core, throughput is measuring how many customers can be served per hour. And while throughput and speed of service are often interchangeably used, throughput is about a lot more than just speed and encompasses all elements of the customer experience. Particularly for the QSR industry, throughput includes efficient store layout, clear signage, preventative maintenance, division of tasks and proper employee training. It’s also about balancing efficiency with the same level of service that encourages customers to consistently return.
With a quick glance at how much the QSR industry leader, McDonald’s, invested in drive-thru technologies in 2019, it’s easy to surmise where the industry is headed and how it plans to maximize profitability. In late 2019, McDonald’s acquired Apprente, in an attempt to reduce wait times and increase throughput with voice-activated drive-thrus. Increasingly more QSR customers are using drive-thrus, and that trend is expected to accelerate with COVID-19 impacting consumer behavior. And while other players in QSR may not have the deep pockets of a McDonald’s, the need to meet changing consumer preferences and to invest in technology that improves drive-thru throughput have been made clear. …
omniX labs is excited to expand its partnership with EverWash, the carwash industry’s leader in membership sales and subscription management, to bring a new layer of analytics and predictive insights to hundreds of carwashes across the country.
From new technologies to fresh sources of capital, the carwash industry has been undergoing massive change in recent years. But no change has been more disruptive than the shift to unlimited membership as the primary business model for carwash owners.
Rather than relying on pay-as-you-go customers to choose and purchase a wash service each time they frequent the carwash, more operators are relying on monthly memberships that guarantee an unlimited number of washes each month. This is because the membership model increases the value of the carwash by creating recurring (and weatherproofed) monthly revenue, along with improved customer loyalty and satisfaction. …
The logistics industry is a complex one, with a highly integrated network of people, technology and physical assets. This interconnected web of moving assets and sheer scale of it presents clear challenges, particularly for terminals that must keep track of all movements in and out of their yard each day.
Capturing container and chassis movements are often done manually — on pen and paper — by guards and other personnel. Hours upon hours are spent every day for yard checks, which — in addition to the costliness — inevitably lead to inaccurate data capture. …
And we couldn’t be happier.
omniX Labs is excited to announce that we have joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program, enabling Google Cloud customers to take advantage of the omniX platform for their computer vision and data analytics needs via the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace.
“omniX is analytics for the physical world, using existing cameras to give you a trusted set of eyes on your business without the need to integrate with legacy systems, and the admission to the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program validates our expertise and dedication to this craft,” says Anoop Kanthan, Co-Founder and CTO of omniX Labs. …
To paraphrase David Begin’s The How of Carwashing Podcast, it used to be that not too long ago carwashes with unlimited club programs were thought of as losing money. Today, the trend has flipped and it’s common knowledge that unlimited clubs are an integral part of maximizing profitability.
Despite the rapid proliferation of the unlimited club, conversion rates from pay-as-you-go customers to unlimited have mostly remained low. From single sites to many of the largest chains, there has been a struggle to see more than 5–10% of total customers converting to unlimited memberships.
Perhaps this is due to the fact that marketing departments just aren’t armed with the necessary intel on their pay-as-you-go customers (beyond a credit card number). Or perhaps sales attendants who are pitching the wash club are undertrained or blasting the same boilerplate message to everyone — often times annoying customers. And while there has been a race to more accurately capture vehicle/member information for wash clubs (spurring the RFID vs LPR debate), the intel on pay-as-you-go customers has been minimal. …
You hear about it in every seminar, convention and news article… Artificial Intelligence is taking over the world!
AI has become the hottest buzzword to (loosely) throw around… it seems just about anything that has a few lines of code in it has AI. But it’s really about being able to mimic the human brain in how we process information and make decisions. Machine learning is another much talked about tech commodity. While it is a subset of AI, machine learning is slightly different. One could think of it as the ability to extract useful patterns from data with minimal human involvement. …
Imagine one day you decided to sit and watch every single customer drive into your store… what would you be able to see? The types of customer vehicles — is it a BMW or a Toyota, sedan or a minivan — the time of the day, total duration, who purchased what… it’d be quite the productive day!
But what if you wanted to know more than what’s visible to the eye, to really understand patterns and trends? And what if you had more than one store to monitor — in multiple states or regions — with different dynamics and volume at each? Would you go to every location, pen and paper in hand, documenting the license plate and customer behavior for thousands of customers? …
When we first started an IoT & RFID services company, we were helping companies with a critical issue: a lack of visibility into their facilities and operations. Giving businesses real time visibility not only helps with minute-by-minute operational needs, but also gives the high level analytics layer to drastically impact the top and bottom line.
While we were providing a much-needed solution to such a critical gap in visibility, we kept running into familiar themes: businesses did not like dealing with the complexities of the hardware component (tags, readers, etc); It was expensive, not just the upfront capital cost, but also the ongoing consumables cost, and regular maintenance; the disruption of existing internal processes; and administrative overhead. So how do you get past these hurdles? Our answer is to use existing hardware that businesses already have: security cameras, which are mostly underutilized unless there’s an incident. …
