Author: Chelsea Elderkin

This weekend, we celebrated 20 years in business!

From a basement, to an underground office with no windows, to two lovely sunny offices on Pride Park housing over 40 members of the PXtech family – what a way we’ve come!

 

 

It’s hard to sum up the last twenty years in just a few sentences… We have people using our software in 40,000 locations all across the world and we’re lucky enough to have the rewarding job of helping charities across the UK support their amazing causes.

We’ve worked with companies big and small and met some amazing people along the way. We’re so happy with how far we’ve come and we couldn’t be more excited for our future!

 

 

We want to say a huge THANK YOU to all of our employees (past and present), customers, suppliers, partners, associates and everyone in between. Thanks to those of you from around the globe, dotted across the UK, and right here in Derby – we couldn’t have done it without you!

 

 

We can’t wait to see what the next twenty years holds for us… watch this space!

The hospitality industry has one of the highest turnover rates than any other industry in the world. For any number of reasons restaurant businesses are constantly seeing employees come and go at a huge cost to their business. This has led to a lot of food businesses offering more incentives to stay: better pay, flexible hours, more training, career progression… But turnover still remains a huge problem.

One thing that is often overlooked when it comes to employee retention is communication. 

It’s a simple concept but a lot of people don’t even think about it. For any hospitality organisation, small or large, communication should be an integral part of your culture and your business plan. You can throw any amount of money at employees but if they’re not engaged with your business goals, they’re still going to be unproductive and inefficient members of staff.

Effective communication has been proven to increase employee retention and motivation. Not only that, better communication between owners, managers and teams helps build employee engagement which increases employee satisfaction, productivity, and profitability.

Engaged and satisfied employees feel valued, listened to and like they have a voice. They understand their role, what they need to do and how, and the impact they have on the organisation.

But how do you communicate this effectively to multiple employees all over the country?

When people think of communication, they think face to face, phone, email, text. However, employees might not get to the phone during busy periods. An email might be missed meaning the information quickly becomes out of date. Texting encourages employees to have their mobile phones out at work and even if it is for work purposes, it still looks unprofessional to the unknowing customer. And getting around to every employee in every location to speak to them face to face would be a full-time job in itself!

So how can you get the right information to your employees at the time they need it?

Hosting your communication platform on your POS, a device that employees regularly use, means that no information is missed. It keeps your teams in the loop with what’s going on instantly. Send messages to let employees know about schedule changes, VIP guests, or remind them about new menu items. Set tasks and targets to boost motivation and so that even unexperienced employees know what they should be doing. Store important documents, procedure or allergy information in a central location where everyone can access them. No more sauce stained papers!

Effective communication is hard to master. But it doesn’t have to be.

If you want to improve communication within your teams, ask us about Bizzlle or check out the website here.

We’re always on the lookout for top talent and boy, have we found some in the last few weeks!

We’re delighted to introduce five new friendly faces to the PXtech team: Rob (DevOps), Nathe (Business Analyst/Trainee Developer), Luke (QA Analyst), Amy (Company Administrator), and Duncan (Senior Developer).

Rob steps into a new role for us here at PXtech; our first ever DevOps Engineer! Responsible for driving automation within the team, Rob will ensure that quality is built in to all of our software build and deployment processes.

Nathe will be splitting his time between two roles: Business Analyst and Trainee Developer. Keen to learn the ropes of code, he’ll bring his BA experience while working towards fulfilling his ambition of becoming a developer.

Luke brings five years’ QA experience in to the business and is an expert at leading teams to top quality success. We’re strong believers that there’s always room to be better and Luke will be on hand to see where we can improve our solutions to add even more value for our customers.

Amy’s enthusiasm and fresh perspective joins the team, taking on the HR administration along with management of the office environment. Working in a previous life for a building society, she’s well equipped to deal with an array of characters – and she’ll sure find some in the PXtech office!

Amy said: “Everyone here has been a dream to work with! There’s no end of things to learn, new challenges to take on and new people to meet. I’m excited to see what the next year will bring.”

Duncan brings some serious coding skills to the team in his role as Senior Developer. Although he always wanted to be a train driver growing up, we’re personally very glad he didn’t choose that career path and stuck to computers instead.

Among the new starters, Leilani, a well-known face here at PXtech, begins her new role as Head of Change. Previously appointed to see us through GDPR hell, Leilani is now helping us to identify where we can work more efficiently across the business, so we can spend more time on the fun stuff – innovating new products, creating new things and widening our customer base!

We’re so excited to see our teams growing and are looking forward to what the future will bring! We’re working on some really exciting things behind the scenes so keep your eyes peeled for future updates…

If you’d like to join the team then check out our latest vacancies here.

 

8:30AM – Arrive at work

Hopefully, I arrive at work just in time for the first tea round – makes for a much better start to my day!

This time is usually used for catching up on emails and picking up where I left off yesterday. It’s useful to remind myself where I got to and try to achieve what I was in the middle of before stand up.

9:50AM – Stand up

This time is used to feedback to the team on my progress yesterday and what I intend to do today.

Now is a good time to pose any questions I have and to mention anything that may be blocking my work. For this stand up, it’s also time to look at the Kanban board for our project. This is something new our team is trying out, to see if we can get a better sight of what is being achieved during this project compared to other projects in the past. It is not without its pains but the general feeling is that it has been worthwhile to try out.

10:00AM – After stand up discussions

Since we’ve already been interrupted by stand up, now is the perfect time to discuss anything we have preying on our minds.

This can be anything from a simple user journey question to working together to overcome a problem. Today that means bringing our new team member up to speed with the project and what outstanding tasks I would like them to do first. I’m working on the front end of this project and would like a call for historical data to be completed so that I can progress further with my screen.

10:15AM – Time to get buried in code

Hoping for no more interruptions until lunch – it’s time for me to get knee deep in code.

Usually this involves working with legacy code and that is part of the battle! However, I am in the very fortunate position that this project is very greenfield. Whilst we are adding features to already existing functionality, our team have taken this opportunity to start fresh. A lot of the old code was done to an older standard, older ideas about the project and with older technologies in play. Now we can bring in newer technologies and our new way of doing things.

For instance, we are using Durandal for the new set of screens we are creating. Not only do we want this to feel like a one page application, but using Durandal helps us to modularise our front end code much better. All in all, this code will be much cleaner to work with in the future, and starting from scratch will benefit us greatly (plus it makes my job so much easier!).

12:30PM – Lunch

Time to get out of the office and clear my head.

Well sort of… Trips to lunch can easily turn into further discussion about problems we are facing in the project and how we might overcome them. It’s not a bad thing; it just shows how challenging the work can be and naturally you’ll want time to mull it over with someone.

1:30PM – Getting back to it

Now it’s time to get back to programming.

Today, I’m trying to not fiddle too much with the UI side of things. Instead, I want to get enough functionality into the screen so that I can complete at least one user journey. I’m working on what we’re calling a set up screen, which allows the user to set goals for their stores. This is by far the hardest screen in the project because there is just so much functionality, different possibilities and user journeys to consider. Now and then, I will come across a problem or a scenario that I want clarifying, but for the most part I am able to just get on with it.

Once I am satisfied that my JavaScript is working as it should, I try out a few quick scenarios. It doesn’t take me long to find an issue – unsurprising at this stage of development. This is the first time I will have called some of the controllers. In this instance it is on creation of a certain type of goal that’s brought up an error, so it’s time to take a look at the server side to sort out the problem.

5:15PM – Home Time

By the end of the day, I would have hoped to have got a big part of functionality done.

You can’t necessarily complete a Kanban task or sub task in a day, so I always try to give myself an aim for where I want to be with that task at the end of a day. While I try to leave my work at a good point to pick up for the next day, that doesn’t happen often.

Usually the time will honestly fly by and I am only reminded by others leaving that it is time for me to go.

At the Chicago Subway Convention I had an epiphany, a realisation through human observation.  I could try and explain it to you in my own words but, by chance, I stumbled across a word online which I think sums up the concept perfectly.

Sonder

n. the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you. (John Koenig – dictionary of obscure sorrows).

Ok, Sonder is technically a made up word but my point still stands: our customers are real people. It seems obvious, but sometimes we are so focused on our customers being customers that we forget this really important fact.

At PXtech, a vital part of our development team’s ethos is to keep the customer as our primary focus.  We start thinking about our customer at the design phase and constantly try to refine our products through the development life cycle. We constantly ask questions like “Why would our customers use this?” and “How could we make this easier for our customers to use?” to ensure we’re on the right track. This approach is already working. I had many people at the convention tell me that they liked what we’ve created and I saw how passionate some of our customers were about our products. However, to take our products to the next level, I think we need to keep in mind the concept of sonder.

Whenever we start to create something, we should not only be thinking about what our customers need as customers, but also what they need as people. We should be creating something which feeds into their lives seamlessly and aims to make their complexities simple.  We should be thinking about what stresses them out on a day to day basis and how our software can make them feel better, happier and healthier by taking away even one little stressor.

From a business point of view, we can start to build up complex pictures of who our customers are, what tasks they do, what they find difficult and most importantly, how they want to use our tools. We can make sure our products are inclusive by catering for all different types of customers. For example, our products should be crisp and simple enough for those who require automatic, high level or quick solutions but detailed enough for those who prefer something configurable and highly detailed. To understand our customers as people means we can ensure we deliver products that are truly valuable for all.

From a selfish perspective, the idea of sonder makes me feel really good about what I do. Yes, we can help save our customers’ time and money but we could also be giving them the tools to enhance their lives in other ways. Just think: we create a product which reduces the time a customer spends on activity X by 30 minutes each week. Making a task more efficient for a customer is always a success but when we factor in sonder, we could also be doing something much greater. Our customer will now have an extra 30 minutes of free time each week. This is 30 minutes they could use to meet with their friends, take their dog for a walk or play with their children. 30 minutes doing something fun or at least something less stressful than activity X. To me, this is a really nice thought. It makes things seem more personal and definitely makes me more passionate.

We can use the concept of sonder to spark new ideas and use it to innovate thoughtful solutions. The next time you’re working on a product, just stop and think. Realise that what you’re doing really can have a positive and meaningful impact on somebody’s life.

Kim Hoffman, Senior QA Analyst

With the rate technology changes, keeping up with the latest gadgets and gizmos can seem impossible. It’s understandable that many businesses are hesitant to invest in new technologies, especially if they’re going to be implemented in tens or hundreds of locations. Investing can be scary because who knows what will come next for restaurant technology? How soon will you have to replace your existing tech to stay on trend and be able to deliver services as customers demand them?

It’s not just technology that changes. As your business grows, your technology may quickly become difficult to work with or no longer meet your business requirements. It may even hold you back, forcing you to maintain old processes that don’t let you work as effectively as possible. Hospitality trends are fickle; customers demand human interaction, convenience, quick and easy service, and online delivery, all rolled into one. Customer demands fluctuate regularly and if your technology isn’t able to keep up, you will quickly find your business falling behind your competitors.

So how do you keep up date with this ever-changing environment?

When looking at tech solutions, the term ‘future-proof’ is used often in marketing spiels. But unless your chosen techies are also time travellers, nothing is guaranteed in the world of future technology. However, there are many options that could help reduce the frequency of replacing technology going forward and limit the disruption of doing so.

Good technology companies who are passionate and interested in future tech will likely be developing and creating technology solutions as trends change. They’ll always be on the lookout for what to do next and where they can push and improve their solutions to help their customers be more successful and work more efficiently and effectively. Here at PXtech, we have an in-house development team, a portion of which are dedicated to keeping their eye on and developing with the newest and up and coming technologies.

Our solutions adapt as your business changes and grow with you as you become more successful. You can modify any element of your solution to suit your working practices and change it at a later date if these should change. The benefit of adaptable technology is that you won’t have to keep replacing it every few years to stay current. With a centralised database and remote management, you can add varying modules to your EPOS software and add in extra functionality should you need it, just at the touch of a button.

Outdated tech can really hinder your chance of success. There are so many different types of restaurants constantly entering the marketplace and competition is rife. Don’t let your technology hold you back.

Invest in good technology. Invest in a good technology company.

If you’d like to talk about your options for updating your technology, get in touch on hospitality@pxtech.com.

Small charities face a “hurricane of change” according to the Facing Forward report by Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales. The report calls for government, funders and larger charities to take action to help small charities in challenging times, echoing some of our own thoughts on the benefits of charity collaboration.

One of the prevalent themes in the report is the effect of the ever-changing digital landscape and what this means for small charities. Over the last few decades, the technology sector has completely transformed the way we live, work and communicate. Among other topics such as Brexit, changes to the government, and funding, advances in technology remains one of the most important influential factors in how the third sector is developing.

The digital divide

The digital divide is constantly widening with many volunteers now needing training and support to be comfortable with the technology they use on a day-to-day basis. Old-fashioned manual cash registers are being replaced with EPOS systems, paper forms are now filled out electronically and charities who are not partaking in digital marketing of some kind will often find themselves struggling in comparison to their more technology-savvy counterparts.

Convenience and Flexibility

Flexible and remote working is also on the increase across all sectors, and charities are not different. Managers must now communicate, plan and organise without needing to be physically present in the shop. Volunteers are increasingly demanding the freedom of adaptable shift patterns and convenient hours, and in many cases will move to the charity who can offer them. The expectation of easily viewing and changing shifts online impacts what workers want from their workplace, voluntary or otherwise.

Autonomous Processes

Automation will also have a large impact on working processes. On a larger scale, the report mentions autonomous cars affecting community transport or breakthroughs in personalised medicine affecting health charities. But even on a granular level, automation of menial tasks will replace some jobs in-store. Simple things will be made much more efficient with automation, such as sending emails out to donors or providing digital checklists to allow volunteers to complete daily tasks without supervision.

Other tech trends such as tracking (of our health, sleep, interactions, and possessions) is tipped to have a large influence on the working practices of many organisations. We’ve yet to understand the wider implications of this kind of data capture but do know that it gives businesses the ability to tailor certain products or services to an individual much easier than before.

Get digital savy

While these developments may seem too advanced or far away in the future for small charities to start thinking about, the acceleration of these trends are already beginning to alter the third sector. There’s no certainty in predicting the future, but staying clued-up and aware of technological developments will certainly help in adapting to meet change in the digital landscape.

The charity retail sector is gradually bringing itself up to date with the same working practices as some of the more pioneering for-profit businesses. While small charities are unlikely to have the capabilities of investing in the most advanced tech, being open-minded, innovative, and eager to embrace a digital transformation will help set you in good stead for the future.

https://www.lloydsbankfoundation.org.uk/Facing-Forward-2017.pdf

Releases are painful.

That is a generally accepted “fact” in many parts of the software industry. Yet it needn’t be so.

Releases can be painful. If you release functionality in a “big bang” style, once per quarter approach, then don’t be surprised if the experience isn’t everything you’d hoped it would be.

Like anything in life, the more you do something, the more you learn, and the easier it becomes. Practice makes perfect. By the same vein, breaking big things up into small chunks often makes them easier.

Take running a marathon (uh oh, bad metaphor coming up…). If you run 26.2 miles in one go, then it’s hard work! If you run 26.2 miles every month, you’ll find it easier, but if you only do it once in a blue moon then chances are you’ll hit a wall at some point, pain will set in and you’ll wonder why on earth you signed up for this nonsense.

Take that same 26.2 miles though, and, let’s say, you run it in 4 parts. Run one part per week for 4 weeks and you’ve finished your marathon. Yes it took longer (did it?), but it was less painful right?

I said it took longer… but that’s not necessarily true. Perhaps you ran the last mile at around the same time you would have anyway, but you ran the first mile a month earlier because you didn’t feel you needed to train as hard or as long for the whole thing?

Because you were running in smaller chunks and resting inbetween, you probably also ran a bit faster. So you were running for less time overall!

To stretch the metaphor to its limit: you probably spent less time running and ‘delivered’ your first miles around 4 weeks earlier than you would have if you did it all in one go.

Still with me? OK, back to software…

By releasing smaller chunks of functionality more frequently, you are able to release them earlier, before everything else is ready to go.

Smaller releases generally take less time too. Because there’s less to push out, less to validate and check, and (in theory) less to go wrong.

Finally, through the act of releasing more often, you learn more about the process you go through, are less likely to make mistakes, and are probably more willing to put the effort in to streamline the process through more automation.

Overall, releasing little and often is a win for you, a win for your team, and most importantly a win for your product and your users.

Ralph Cooper, Head of Software Development

Business intelligence (BI) is an incredibly powerful and useful tool for restaurant owners, even more so if you manage multiple sites at once. Integrating a BI solution with a good EPOS system is essential for those wishing to succeed. The insights garnered from a single software platform hosted in a centralised database can assist restaurant owners and managers in better understanding their business, their employees, and their customers. Knowing exactly what is going on at any one time, from any location in the world, can help you make informed decisions and ensure you’re always maximising efficiency and boosting productivity and sales.

Here are just a few insights that BI can give you about your business:

Sales data

From the most lucrative time of day, week, month or year, to your most sold meal – sales data can give valuable insights into which of your marketing efforts are succeeding, what your customers most desire and means you can ensure popular items are readily available across locations. If you know peak selling times and your demand for a product, you can enhance your operations, keeping customers happy and improving customer service.

Employee productivity

Knowing which employees are more productive than others allows you to identify your best team members so you can optimise teams and ensure you have the most productive employees working together at the most profitable selling times. Having an idea about how your employees work together makes employee scheduling easier and knowing how many people to have on at any one time reduces unnecessary labour costs.

Stock control

Keeping an eye on your inventory lets you know when you need to reorder items, what’s been popular, what hasn’t, and could indicate if employees are helping themselves to a free lunch.

Integrated with tablet ordering and Kitchen Display Systems, stock control modules also allow you to alert staff immediately of any out of stock items, reducing the number of unhappy customers and awkward apologies after orders have been placed.

Spot trends and possible fraudulent activity

BI is tremendous at showing you certain trends and patterns in your restaurant data. For example, it can alert you to discrepancies in stock or unusual transactions (such as a large number of voids) that may highlight fraudulent activity or indicate that further staff training is needed. This allows you to rectify any issues right away so you can always be at your most profitable. Tracking employee IDs for certain transactions and using CCTV drilldown means no one is falsely accused and you can rectify any issues before they have a large impact on your organisation.

Business intelligence gives a detailed and in-depth view of your whole business, across stores, locations and brands. It’s important you know how your business is performing so you can make better decisions about where you should pay most of your attention to. Tracking business activity means you can always be aware of any issues and resolve them immediately and it also means you can view and celebrate your ongoing success!

If you’d like to know more about how business intelligence can help your business, get in touch on hospitality@pxtech.com.

You developers have got it easy when it comes to staying up to date with current tech. Even if you’re not lucky enough to be working with the latest and greatest stuff like the team at PXtech, you’re at least writing code every day, solving software problems, and keeping your tech mind sharp 9-5.

Since becoming development manager, I’ve really had to work hard to keep my development skills up to date. As time has gone on, my workload has shifted away from the code, and more towards reports, organisation, recruitment etc. (you know, all that management stuff). This meant that dipping into the code on the rare occasions I was able to, was just getting more and more difficult, and taking more and more time to get up to speed with what was going on. It didn’t help that making even an hour of space to focus on it without interruptions was nigh on impossible.

Things are changing though. Focusing is easier, I’m able to get productive from a cold start more quickly, and many of the newer frameworks the team are using don’t feel quite as alien anymore. Put another way, I feel in touch. Not as on top of everything as I’d like to be, but I can be productive as a developer alongside my responsibilities as a manager.

I wanted to share some of the tactics I’ve used to get to this point, and will continue to use to maintain the skills that are so valuable to me and, I hope, to my role at PXtech.

Make the space

It sounds obvious, but if you don’t make the space to work on your development skills, you won’t be able to work on them. Making the space is actually the easy bit, protecting it is harder. Distractions such as email, meetings, questions etc. all break your flow, which as you know is just disastrous for programming.

I did a few things to defend this time, which really helped. First I made a conscious effort to get control over when meetings happened. Bunching them together is best and planning the preparation and follow up time appropriately also helps. Second, I closed Outlook (I can sense the collective intake of breath from here). Yes that’s right, I closed my email, and most days I will only check emails at 11am and 3pm. I can’t claim credit for this idea, but this guy can.

Finally, I accepted that I needed to regularly commit time out of work to learning. It’s good practice for developers anyway, but essential if you’re not 100% development focused in your day job.

Embrace generalism

Sounds backwards right? The most successful programmers out there specialise, and for good reason. If you’re a generalist then your skills are in rich supply. If you’re a specialist, then you’re that big fish in a small pond (hat tip to John Sonmez).

Well, all that is true, but now you’re managing a team of specialists and aspiring specialists, and you need to know at least a little bit about what each of them is doing. Chances are your experience will help them hone that speciality and (if you’re doing your job right) apply it to your team’s products in the most effective way through excellent application architecture design.

I try to learn something new every week. Whether it’s a technique one of my team are using, or looking at an emerging technology area so I can have an informed discussion on it with our expert in that area. It helps to push me and my team, as well as keeping my knowledge relevant to what’s being worked on

Have a side project

I can’t stress this enough. It’s all very well aiming to be an active member of the development team, delivering value to the customer by coding features and completing sprint items, but sooner or later you’ll be pulled away and you’ll go through a period where getting anything (technical) done is not, and cannot be top of your priority list. The team will be impacted, sprint goals will be missed, and you’ll feel awful being the one dragging everyone else down. Sorry – it’s a fact, and you can bet it’ll happen at the worst time.

For that reason, I try to limit my direct delivery of backlog features to relatively independent, lower priority items. Naturally, they’re also not always the most interesting.

To afford myself the luxury of playing with the very latest tech in an interesting way and being able to dip in and out as required, I have a side project (an important one, but a side project nonetheless) that only I work on. It’s my playground for want of a better word. Somewhere I can try things out and learn new things safely. It’s been invaluable to me in staying up to date and keeping up with the team around me.

Read endlessly

Read tech blogs, news, books, everything you can to keep a grip on where the industry is going. Not only do you want to make sure you’re focusing your precious time in the right areas, but you need to keep tabs on your team to ensure you have the right mix of capabilities in the right areas.

I find Twitter is a particularly useful tool for this. I check it as frequently as I can, and try to keep the majority of the people I follow relevant to my industry. (If it helps, set up another account for this!)

Learn from your team

One of the best resources available to you, is sat right with you in the same room most of the time. These are the people who you are entrusting and helping to become specialists in their respective fields, so learn from them. Get them to show you what they’re doing, explain it, and help you apply it. They’ll benefit from your eyes and approval of their work, and you’ll benefit from the research and learning they did to get to that point. Win-Win.

So there are the 5 main tactics I have used to keep myself up to date since letting go of development full time. It’s hard – really hard – but I’m not ready to let go of it yet, and I can’t yet imagine a time when I will be.

Ralph Cooper, Head of Software Development