Restaurants

How a QSR tech pioneer inspires innovation: Inspire Brands' Paul Brown

Paul Brown, CEO of Inspire Brands, speaks on "Building a Culture that Sparks Innovation" at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday.

Paul Brown, CEO of Inspire Brands, addresses inspiring innovation. Photo courtesy of Inspire Brands.

October 19, 2020 by Elliot Maras — Editor, Kiosk Marketplace & Vending Times

It's no exaggeration to say the restaurant industry is experiencing a technology revolution, and companies that want to survive and prosper need to innovate.

On Tuesday, attendees at the MUFSO virtual conference will have a chance to hear from a leader of one of the more innovative restaurant companies when Paul Brown, CEO of Inspire Brands, speaks on "Building a Culture that Sparks Innovation" at 3:30 p.m.

Brown, whose resume includes leadership roles at Arby's, Hilton Worlwide, Expedia Inc. and McKinsey & Co., will offer his insights on how to stimulate innovation in a team. His presentation is sponsored by the Kiosk Manufacturer Association.

The presentation will no doubt resonate with an industry scrambling to improve guest demands for safer service and more effective communication.

Inspire Brands, which owns more than 11,000 Arby's, Buffalo Wild Wings, Sonic Drive-In, Rusty Taco and Jimmy John's restaurants, has deployed technology on several fronts in the last year, with self-service as a recurring theme.

"Across the Inspire enterprise we are building a robust digital infrastructure that enables guests to engage when, where and how they want with the brand," Brown told Kiosk Marketplace in an email interview.

Last year, Sonic Drive-In introduced AI powered voice assistants integrated with menus at drive-thrus in partnership with Mastercard to providing faster customer service.

"We look forward to piloting AI-powered voice assistants in select drive-ins to create an even more personalized and dynamic ordering experience," Brown said.

Sonic was also recently one of five brands to launch the new voice capabilities in the Amazon Alexa App, which enables guests to connect with the Sonic App on their mobile devices simply by asking Alexa.

Enhanced online orders

Inspire Brands further enhanced its ordering capability by partnering with ItsaCheckmate, which integrates multiple online ordering platforms into POS systems.

"We've deployed digital solutions to enhance restaurant operations, including a strategic partnership with point-of-sale integration solution ItsaCheckmate that will enable our restaurants to prepare food faster, reduce labor spent on manually entering orders, and reconcile accounting," Brown said.

The solution makes particular sense for Inspire Brands, with food orders coming from various online ordering platforms and delivery services that otherwise must be manually entered into a POS system.

ItsaCheckmate's integration with Arby's has yielded:

Expanded guest access to restaurants.
Decreased complexity for team members.
A timed order release where an order is delivered to the POS within five minutes of the delivery driver's arrival.
A decreased unaccepted order rate.
Improved accounting accuracy.

"Additionally, Buffalo Wild Wings opened its first 'GO' model restaurant in May 2020," Brown said. "Unique to the 'GO' format, guests who order ahead will be able to pick up their meal from heated takeout lockers, providing a contactless and hassle-free experience."

Enhanced supply chain

On the supplier side of the business, the company has focused on its supply chain, tapping supply chain specialist CMX to improve its efficiencies.

The CMX1 platform helps Inspire Brands manage supplier relationships and compliance, bringing automation and speed to the product commercialization process, managing and monitoring food safety and quality assurance, and resolving non-conformances from audits and product quality incidents experienced by suppliers.

"The use of CMX1 will be an important part to the successful move toward a more integrated approach across all our brands," Byron Theodore, the company's senior director of global quality assurance said in a prepared statement. "With its unique ability to manage and bring visibility across multiple brands, CMX1 is designed to do the heavy lifting by centralizing data, decreasing paper, and enabling automation to ensure our suppliers are meeting our expectations and standards as we scale."

How to inspire innovation

So how does a company achieve all this innovation?

According to Brown, "Inspire's purpose-driven culture is fundamental to uniting and motivating our team members. I've seen many examples of this over the past few months."

These include:

Operation Appreciation: The support centers wrote letters of encouragement and appreciation to 100% of corporate owned restaurants.
Camp Inspire: The team held a monthlong calendar of virtual engagements such as virtual art lessons and a surprise concert featuring TLC.
Restaurant Bonus: The company provided a bonus payment to restaurant team members at Arby's and Sonic who worked during the early stages of the pandemic
Young Achievers Academy: The company launched an onsite remote learning center that is 100% subsidized and supports parents in its support center.

"At Inspire, our focus remains on meeting the needs of our guests today while anticipating how those needs will evolve moving forward," Brown said. "To this end, we identified key leaders across the Inspire platform to step out of their day-to-day roles and focus on how the industry and broader world will change as a result of this crisis"

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