Wagamama cuts downtime with rugged devices

Restaurant chain Wagamama has decided to ditch PDAs in favour of rugged devices in order to keep the handhelds in the hands of waiters longer.

About a year ago, Wagamama decided to overhaul the handheld devices its staff use to take orders and payments. "We depreciate all our devices over three years. By the time we got to two years, the devices were really struggling," Jerry Marks, operations officer of Wagamama told silicon.com. "They had large battery packs that had started to fail."

The kit the restaurant chain used at the time was, according Marks, not only spending too long on recharge, it was also in need of constant repair.

"We had a number of problems with it so we went out looking for something more robust," he said. "As time and technology went on, we came across the PPT8846. It met our needs – memory, processor speeds - and it could house the software we wanted to run on it."

Wagamama rolled out the devices to its 39 restaurants over the course of 12 month period, replacing each location's equipment as it reached the end of its three-year replacement cycle.

Before the company's conversion to Symbol, it had flirted with using iPaqs.

"We found the units were dying after two to three hours of solid use," Marks noted. "It meant we had to have double the amount of units – if there were eight waiters, we needed 16 iPaqs."

The devices also didn't stand up to the rigours of Wagamama's waiters the company found. Marks said the company examined the idea of buying cheaper PDAs for shortened replacement cycle but found the figures didn't fit. "The restaurants are fairly tough places and although the staff look after the devices, it's a fast-paced environment and they will take a battering," Marks said.

Wagamama eventually selected the PPT8846 rugged devices. According to Marks, the main benefit of the Symbol switch was a cut in maintenance costs. "One of the greatest things was the massive decline in maintenance," he said. "With the iPaqs we had engineers in pretty much every day. Now we tend to get them once every two weeks because someone has a cracked screen."

Using the Symbol devices also meant a tangible cost saving for the chain. Additional battery packs for PPT8846 cost around £35, compared with around £100 for the iPaq equivalent, Marks said.

Now the only minor headache for the restaurants is a loss of settings data when the units are powered down, which is replaced via back-up software from a thin client.

Wagamamas is already looking to new applications that can be run on the devices. Marks told silicon.com that one possible future feature could be a bar code reader, enabling waters and waitresses to simply scan in a diner's choice from the menu or use the reader to scan money off or gift vouchers to deduct cash from the bill instantly.