RLC Talks - Streamlining Restaurant Operations with SynergySuite: A Conversation with Cristal Craven

In this episode, Cristal Craven, Director of Strategic Partnerships at SynergySuite, introduces herself and explains the concept of 'back office' in the restaurant industry. She discusses how SynergySuite's all-in-one platform simplifies operations by integrating various essential functions like inventory management, scheduling, cash management, and kitchen safety. Cristal emphasizes the importance of partnerships and data consolidation for making informed business decisions. She also highlights SynergySuite's strategy of using tools like Tableau for customizable reports, which allow brands to make specific, data-driven decisions without overburdening the engineering team. The conversation covers the evolving landscape of restaurant technology and how adopting a comprehensive back office solution can save costs, reduce waste, and streamline operations, particularly in times of economic uncertainty.

00:00 Introduction to Cristal Craven

00:21 Defining Back Office Software

01:03 SynergySuite's Comprehensive Approach

02:03 Importance of Data and Partnerships

04:27 Simplifying Technology for Operators

06:52 Adapting to Industry Challenges

09:25 How to Connect with SynergySuite

10:34 Closing Thoughts and Reflections

Transcript

Jeremy Julian: 0:00

For those that don't know who you, who Crystal Craven is, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience?

Cristal Craven: 0:04

thanks. I am Crystal Craven. I'm the director of Strategic Partnerships for Synergy Suite back Office platform here in this space. I also am the co-founder of Wirth, which is Women of Restaurants, technology and hospitality. and I do a lot of work with women in restaurant leadership. I'm an industry girl.

Jeremy Julian: 0:20

Love that. Love that. So for those that don't know, define what a back office is for those that might be living under a rock and don't understand what that means.

Cristal Craven: 0:27

That's fair. back office is all the software that you use to help control prime costs. So at the basic level, you have inventory and purchasing for food costs. You have your, scheduling and sort of employee maintenance compliance for labor. And then the only way to do that is to have things like good reporting. So we have reporting, we have cash management, operational workflow management, so like checklists and manager logs. And then. the last piece of that is actually hasp because that really ties together. So your kitchen safety should be a part of manager logs. Your kitchen safety and temperature should be a part of purchasing and receiving. So we do that all in one platform.

Jeremy Julian: 1:02

Amazing. And I think it's funny'cause you talk about that and I think for some people, back office means one specific thing. It's purchasing, it's inventory management. The thing that I love about Synergy Suite is you guys run the gamut and do quite a bit in that space.

Cristal Craven: 1:15

Yeah. I mean it. what? There was some ridiculous quote that I did not believe until I looked it up, but it's something like in store you have 50 different technologies that you have to use, so that's 50 different login languages. It's not it, not even the logins, right? It's the languages that you have to speak. It's the ui, it's the experience of using it. So if you can take all the little pieces of running the back part of. The restaurant and put them into one platform where every part of that is, is best in breed, right? You have great modules, but it makes your manager's lives so much easier. It's seven less, things that they have to manage and I think it makes them more efficient at doing their job. So I think that's why having back office platform as opposed to a back office product is so important.

Jeremy Julian: 1:58

Yeah. No, and I love that. And one of the things that I also love about you guys is that you guys are. You guys take data in from other sources to be able to make better business decisions. Because having a back office that's just counting those things without making business decisions, in my opinion, is worthless. But having something that's gonna help you make more money, help you save money, is really the critical part. And so tell me how you do that from a partnership perspective.'cause you're one of the best in the industry at that partnership side of things. The

Cristal Craven: 2:22

partners, the data from other places that, that from a technology standpoint is just common sense. and if you really think about it. Good business sense for us. partnerships is one thing, but the data consolidation in the back office, we're already touching so many different pieces of data from the point of sale. But let's just say that there's another external data source that isn't necessarily part of our platform, which is why we utilize a white label Tableau, right in Synergy Suite. And the reason that we do that is so that you can have the data that you need to make decisions. we know that we are not. The center of the universe, that sometimes there may be a data set that you need to pull into the look at some, cross analysis for reporting. But also if you think about it from a business perspective, and this is why we can be good at partnerships because we understand our swim lanes and we also understand what we shouldn't do. And what we shouldn't do is create a new custom report that our engineering team has to develop in a two week sprint or two, two week sprint. Every time a very specific need of a customer arises that we'll never have any bearing across any other brand. So that doesn't make sense.

Jeremy Julian: 3:22

Yes.

Cristal Craven: 3:22

But we can put Tableau into Synergy Suite. You can bring in that data piece on some random part that's really important to your brand. You can create that report that is really specific to you. it doesn't, back up our engineering team. It gives you what you need in the actual platform. And that gives us space to focus on other areas of the business, like innovation, growth of it, and also making sure that we have really tight. Strong integrations with our partners who do the things that we will never do, like payroll, like accounting. yeah. I think it's just a different approach to not being the center of the universe. be a good partner and let people bring in the data they need to run their business.

Jeremy Julian: 3:58

and it's always ironic to me because. There's times that reports need to be run on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Sure. Yeah. Those should be part of the core. Yeah. But then there's these one-off analytical reports that somebody needs to decide, are we gonna change suppliers for this one product? Yes. We might need that as a one-off. We're gonna decide we're changing chicken win wing providers for some. Bar and grill, they might need that as a one-off. You don't need to create that report. And the flexibility that you guys have to be able to do that is amazing.

Cristal Craven: 4:23

I think it's just really important and it's, like I said, it's common sense. Yeah. It's common sense technology. why are we over complicated? And look, you and I have been doing this for a very long time, and I always tell people when I first started in restaurant tech 18 years ago. it was really just a very fancy cash register. It really was very much so was there was no enterprise menu management. There wasn't consolidated reporting that came off of spreadsheets. The biggest thing was PCI compliance and people were like, what is that? Yeah. We're using LogMeIn to support your systems uhhuh. it's just so different. It's so complicated right now. We don't need to make it more complicated. Let's give you some really nice, simple common sense tools that make sense. We'll make the technology elegant. We will make the complexity there if you need it, but we'll also not make it hard if we don't need to.

Jeremy Julian: 5:05

Yeah. Which I wish more technologists that are here would think about the operator at the end of the day. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, the operator's the one that's gonna get you the quality of data to be able to make the decisions. And oftentimes they make it so complex that then they stop using it and they don't get the results that they're looking for.

Cristal Craven: 5:19

It's kinda, you want, they build tech. I, and don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for people who build technology, but, it's not a game. We're not building games for our own fun and, tickles and fun. we're building tools that people use to, to support their lives of their employees, to support the lives of their businesses. it's not a game. So we don't get to just play around by building technology that is not useful to you. We don't get to play around by doing things that are really cool, that we can make money off of, that we can shine and dazzle you with. our job is to build business tools so that you can run your business so that you can. Feed people. Yep. But also feed your employees and feed your staff. Make money, continue to grow. Stay in grow, yeah. And continue to grow. I think I might be boring that way. I don't, I think what we do needs to be, useful.

Jeremy Julian: 5:59

There needs to be business value. I say it all the time on the show, the long form show. It's like technology for technology's sake is worthless. But technology that truly solves business problems is the end all. Be all. Yeah. And I think more people need to think that way. in our space. And again, I love all of the new technology. I think it's so great, but if it's not making people's lives better Faster, helping'em make more money. making the job of the operators easy. Easier. Then, you know what, it's not gonna end up scaling

Cristal Craven: 6:22

and save that technology for other things like games. I like playing Clash of Clans, but you know what, it does not make me money or make my life better, but it's really fun and I love it when there's software updates. That's

Jeremy Julian: 6:30

so funny. I love it. My wife is, she's got a couple of games and I'm like, why do you do this? She's because it just helps me chill out. So yeah,

Cristal Craven: 6:36

that's why I do it. I love it. I actually, Allie, good old Allie Haskell is also a clash of planner, so we have bonded over that. Oh, got that. But yeah, that's where I think technology is creative and is fun, but it's something that isn't like for, it's not. It's not business technology, right? I think with business technology build what's needed.

Jeremy Julian: 6:52

we're at RLC while we're recording this, there's a lot of people that are talking about uncertainty. They're talking about guest counts. They're talking about their cost going up. Help me understand how Synergy Suite is like a place that you guys are gonna help solve that problem. A year from now when all of this uncertainty is settled, how can Synergy Suite really help those that are out there in the space? What kind of things do you see that people should be doing that they aren't doing as it relates to implementing a back office solution? Sure. That can solve these problems.

Cristal Craven: 7:18

one is, I think there's a lot of money that's left on the table because it's too hard to track. So that, that's critical right now. You have to care about every napkin. You have to track every napkin. You have to do constant analysis to see where your prices are going up. You have to do what if menu scenarios to see if there's things that you have to change from a pricing perspective. And we actually have a lot of good partners you can help with that as well. it's not just what you can do in Synergy Suite, it's how we can partner with people like AI tools like single Flare ai, right? You wanna do really in-depth menu analysis. We'll work with them. but for Synergy Suite, I think. Making it easy to make those decisions. And that covid word pivot, I think is coming back. We're back on a wave now. being able to really do an analysis on your suppliers, being able to do analysis on your menu, and then make tracking your inventory and your purchasing, like really, we use AI for purchasing, like really having. Really locked in specific, precise purchasing. I think that's really important.'cause we can't really change the cost Yeah. Of the item, but we can make sure you don't order too much. We can make sure you don't waste too much. And we can make it easy to count every single thing so you can have a very accurate

Jeremy Julian: 8:27

and make business decisions back to what we've been talking about and make business

Cristal Craven: 8:29

decisions on that. And I think. I think Covid more than anything. actually not more than anything. Covid did a lot of other things. So one of the things Covid did not more than anything, is it taught people the importance of things like packaging. There's so many costs around that, and I think that what we do a really good job of is not making it a huge hurdle. To do a full inventory.

Jeremy Julian: 8:51

Yep.

Cristal Craven: 8:51

And you should be, you shouldn't be just doing your high cost items maybe every day or actually maybe every shift. But, so those are the ways that I think we can really bring value to the table in this current landscape is giving you precise data to make better decisions, making it faster, and helping you not to reduce your cost, but maybe alleviate. Your waste and make better decisions. So you can reduce your own costs with suppliers or choices that you're making about your menu, or at

Jeremy Julian: 9:15

least have those conversations and be aware of it. So then you can make the business decision, whether it's to increase menu price or to go back to your supplier and go, Hey, maybe I don't need as much of this, or whatnot. how do people get in touch? How do people learn more? How do people dig into. Synergy Suite and

Cristal Craven: 9:28

you can always, reach out to our awesome partners like CVS North Star and say, get us in touch. Thanks in for the plug. Get us in touch with Synergy Suite.'cause we love coming through partners. we're easy to find Synergy Suite. it is not an uncommon word, Synergy Suite all one word.com. you can, it's a LinkedIn world. You can always find, myself on LinkedIn. Those director of partnerships, I'd love to in make some introductions. and Brett Berger is our SVP of sales. He is an awesome guy. He's here at RLC with us. He's actually doing his job and busy having some meetings right now. Love it. I think re to find, we also try and be good partners in the sense that there's a lot of thought. Leadership that we try and put out there. not from a sales perspective, but just from a learning. And lifting our partners up perspective. do some searches.'cause I think we've done some really good informative stuff in the last, year that I think people could benefit from, back office AI or, tips and tricks for, financial accounting. So I think we put some stuff out.

Jeremy Julian: 10:19

Yeah, no, I think that, that's great. And I think even not that I. Even if they're using competitive products, taking some of the things that you guys have already done to implement them could make their business better. And really the purpose of the podcast and why I do what I do is I love the restaurant industry. It's given me so much. And so how do we help give back?

Cristal Craven: 10:34

thank you for spending. I love it too. I love it too. What do what do we do if we were in something else?

Jeremy Julian: 10:38

I, when people ask me how am I doing, I say, I am blessed every day.'cause I get to work in an amazing industry with some really cool people.

Cristal Craven: 10:44

Yeah, I agree with that. I agree. I thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you and this has been a fun show. So I hope we've gotten to have a lot of fun conversations with people.