OCTOBER 20239The robotics teams will be able to pick apart your vision and tie pieces of it to their current capabilitiesthe processes therein to know where the automation journey should begin. This department is where you should look to find the leader of the right team as you embark on your automation journey. Finding An Automation PartnerAlmost every brand will need a partner to bring missing skill sets to the table, but where do you find a robotics partner? If you don't have any existing relation-ships to leverage, start by attending some of the top restaurant trade shows. The NAFEM show in February 2023 show-cased far more automation and robotic technology than I was expecting. I proj-ect that the NRA show in Chicago will have just as many automation resources, if not more. Our industry is ripe for this type of investment, and the vendors are taking notice. It is unlikely that you will find a single robotics partner that has all of the capabilities you need, so keep your options open and be bold in your conversations. It is far more likely that you will find several partners, each of whom does something well, to complete your automated process. Remember, these partners don't know your brand like you do, if at all. Finding the right partners will require you to clearly express your vision for automation within your operation. The robotics teams will be able to pick apart your vision and tie pieces of it to their current capabilities. They may even be willing to invest in a capability you need that they don't currently have because they were simply unaware there was a need for it in the industry. To get the right partners, you need to possess a clear automation vision for your brand. Building the VisionStart by reviewing the business as a whole. Think about how your brand interacts with guests and which touch-points are most important to your brand culture. Always have a guest-first mindset in everything you do, even when considering automation. There will be aspects of the guest's journey where you will want to maintain human interaction, so it's important to determine what is off-limits for automation. Once you've developed and aligned the list of processes that are out of scope, start to review your larger processes, and break them down into smaller parts. Try to find the important processes, yet simple and very repetitive, as those are typically your best automation targets. As you work through establishing your vision, be sure to consider how products will move along the critical production path. It doesn't make much sense to automate steps A and step B but still require human interaction to get from A to B unless perhaps that is the extent of the production process. Most processes won't be so simple, so be sure to include your desire for how products will move through the automation environment.Taking the Giant First StepBefore you start ­ ensure that your brand is ready to take the automation journey seriously. As with most large-scale ini-tiatives, automation will require human and capital resources, and the ROI will not be immediate. For franchisors, the franchisees will not trust the automation plan until it is proven, be prepared to fully fund the prototype and its testing cycles. For operators with a clear vision, it is critical that you rally support for this initiative with your executive team to be on the cutting edge of future industry processes.
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