RTN Workgroups

RTN workgroups are innovative think-tanks, where all RTN members have a seat at the table. Technology companies and restaurateurs roll up their sleeves together, and collaborate to solve real-world challenges. By joining the workgroups, you can shape the future of restaurant technology, using your voice, tech talent and brand influence to produce best practices, technical guidance and standards.

Workgroups provide excellent networking, both supplier-to-supplier and restaurant-to-supplier. You'll get to know top tech talent in our industry, and find out who's who when it comes to getting things done.

Since its inception, RTN has become the single driving force behind the creation of technology standards in the restaurant industry. To date, RTN has published six technology standards (defined below). This workgroup is designed to focus on the following:

Define ways to create awareness around the existence of technology standards.
Evangelize standards adoption among the vast array of restaurant technology-focused suppliers.
Create assessment tools to help suppliers identify how far along they are on the journey towards adoption, and where they may need to focus to get there faster.
Identify badges of recognition and governance around the badge attribution, mapped to each standard, which may allow restaurants to recognize suppliers in compliance with, or in support of, restaurant technology standards.

Call for Restaurant Operator Support

RTN encourages restaurant operators who support technology standardization to attend this workgroup. Your strong show of support is critical to guide suppliers towards adoption.

Call for Tech Supplier Support

RTN supplier members are encouraged to join this critical moment in time workgroup, in support of the industry as we collectively move the needle when it comes to standardization and mass adoption. Share your technology, marketing and industry expertise in this all-hands-on-deck workgroup and ensure your brand has a seat at the table.

Join us to identify best practices for holistically understanding restaurant guests and uncover ways to positively influence most-desired behavior. This could include exploring customer data platforms, customer engagement, and overall operational effectiveness.

Topics of Discussion:

Pros vs. cons of marketplace offerings
Capturing guest data (integration implications)
Segmentation & personalization
Effective incentives for guest identification - “loyalty”
Increasing the guest “likelihood to return”

In Phase 1, the RTCF defined functional areas, capabilities, and use cases for restaurant solutions. It was created to allow restaurant technology stakeholders to speak a common language, as well as identify relationships between systems and business processes and accelerate enhanced restaurant business capabilities.

Phase 2 will explore all areas of restaurant enterprise architecture and overall operations. Phase 2 may explore ways you can utilize the tool, identify use cases, map to vendor solutions, explore maturity Indexing, etc.

Inviting technology companies to share ROI calculators for specific technologies, and creating a library of ROI tools and resources for restaurants. This may be useful when passing on the value of tech to franchisees and / or evangelizing tech decisions internally. This group may also consider how capital investments are funded (pros and cons of borrow vs buy). The potential outcome of this workgroup may reference or augment former RTN work, including documentation on Restaurant Technology KPIs and RTN’s Restaurant Technology Capabilities Framework.

Take-out became table stakes during the pandemic, and it's still taking off, with no sign of slowing. In fact, it's become increasingly critical for restaurants to get it right. From speed of service, minimizing wait and delivery times, to order accuracy, restaurants must find the best way to get orders from inside the four walls into consumer hands. That includes tapping next-gen tech to drive optimal user experiences. This Workgroup explored the evolutionary ways take-out tech has taken off - and what this may look like as technologies get even smarter.

Potential technologies to explore:

Geolocation
Food Lockers
Labeling
Delivery driver pick-up solutions
Mobile tech for staff
Curbside delivery robotics
Takeout window and the tech driving it

Explore Current Workgroups

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