ONLINE ORDERING SYSTEM SIMPLIFIES CANTEEN MANAGEMENT!
Elanora Heights Primary School, on Sydney’s northern beaches, is using touchscreen and swipecard technology to improve canteen efficiency and cut down the workload.
Canteen Manager Tina Goddard has been at the school for eight years. Around two years ago she began looking into the various technology-based systems on the market designed to make running a canteen easier.
After much research, she decided upon the Munch Monitor system, which enables parents and students to place their canteen orders in advance into a website. The information is then accessed by the canteen staff at the school via a broadband-connected touchscreen computer provided by Munch Monitor.
The system also provides swipe cards which students can use to purchase food from the canteen, using the same principle as EFTPOS transactions – money is automatically withdrawn from an account set up via the Munch Monitor website. This effectively allows the students and canteen staff to dispense with cash transactions, while also enabling parents to have greater say in their child’s purchases.
As Tina points out, the Munch Monitor system has certainly cut down canteen staff labour and preparation time: “Using the old system, you’d have to mark off lists of lunch orders, take money out of bags, count it up, store it safely, bank it – the Munch Monitor system saves at least half an hour every morning and afternoon tallying up – it’s much more efficient. Parents or students can order their meals online in advance, and the system also allows parents to ‘block’ their child’s access to certain products or foods. So the parent can nominate how much, what and when the child is allowed to buy.”
Tina explains the system is particularly beneficial for children with food allergies – their parents can read through the canteen menu online and identify which foods or products are to be avoided. This information is registered in their Munch Monitor account, and when the child uses their swipe card at the canteen, all this data is presented to canteen staff.
“When you swipe the card their details come up and you can’t give them any products their parents have blocked,” Tina explains. “This gives parents a lot more control over what their kids are buying at school.”
Each canteen using the Munch Monitor system has its list of food/products on a special part of the Munch Monitor website, which parents and students access once they’ve registered their details by logging in to the account for that particular school.
“We were also supplied a touchscreen computer with a printer – so each morning the computer gives us the lunch orders for the day, prints out our labels for each order and off we go.”
As soon as a parent sets up an account for their child, Tina also supplies the child with a swipe card. “It’s a great idea – no lost money, no little kids forgetting their lunch money, no more problems! About 80 per cent of our orders come through online now or via the swipe card so I think I go to the bank about a quarter less than I used to.”
Tina says the system also provides her with sales reports and enables online stocktaking – “each fortnight I’m emailed a breakdown of sales and I get a comprehensive summary once a term, so I know what I’ve sold and how much, what my best and worst selling products are and so on. It’s very handy for ordering – I know exactly how much I need to buy.
“Like most canteens, we are very short staffed which is why we went looking for a system like this. I start at quarter past eight so I can pull lunch orders down from the system before the kids get in. Getting this kind of a head-start in the morning cuts down the number of staff we need to get everything done in time for lunch.”
Tina adds that Munch Monitor have been very supportive – “they’re only a phone call away and have always been ready to help. And if we have a blackout the system automatically backs itself up.
“We also have our year six students serving in the canteen – and of course the kids are a lot quicker than the adults in picking up how to use the system. But even for adults it’s very manageable and easy to ease.”
The Munch Monitor system is the brainchild of Scott McClure, a chartered accountant who got the idea from friends talking about their experiences in ordering canteen lunches for their kids. Scott says, “it was still stuck in the 1950s – writing out orders on paper bags, getting the right money. And the older kids were saying, ‘Mum can I have some money?’ and mum would pull out a $20 bill because it was the smallest she had, and of course she’d never see the change and didn’t know where it was going to be spent.
“So I thought there had to be a better way. At first it was just an academic exercise, but in 2007 I put a team of people together to look at it seriously. As part of that we volunteered in different canteens across Sydney – we spent over 310 hours just figuring out how things worked and whether this could actually work in practice.”
The research paid off, and Munch Monitor was prototyped in 2007, got its first customer in 2008 and shifted from development focus to sales focus mid last year. The system is now in more than 30 schools, with around 10,000 parent/student users.
Scott says the feedback from canteens has been very positive. “In April we conducted a customer survey and over 97 per cent of parents and 100 per cent schools using it recommended it. We’ve worked very hard to make it easy to use, from the point of view of both parents and canteen staff.
“Because canteens have a mixture of paid staff and volunteers, the software needs to be extremely intuitive – you look at it and how you think it will work is how it works.”
Of course Munch Monitor is not the only such system on the market – but Scott says “increasing competition is not a bad thing – it’s going to make sure everyone continues to strive to come up with better products.”
