Boosting Agility in Fast Food Chains with EMQX: A Smart Restaurant Solution

It’s hard work to run a restaurant, especially a thousand of them. Even with the benefits of fast-evolving digital technologies – like self-service counters, mobile apps, handheld barcode scanners, smart sensors, and edge servers, most modern fast-food restaurant chains are challenged in taking advantage of them well to engage more customers from multiple channels. This is why a reliable solution to seamlessly bridge communication between restaurants and back offices is essential.

EMQ's solution offers a convenient way for merchants to manage orders that are scattered across various channels. With the ability to monitor and maintain equipment in real-time, the solution can help reduce order delays. This, in turn, can help them to attract customers from all possible channels with a better dining experience.

Key Operational Challenges in Fast Food Restaurant Chains

Selling on All Channels

Customers can place orders through various channels, including the counter, self-service kiosks, or their mobile phones. Although these transactions occur on different terminals, they share the same inventory. To provide the best user experience and prevent overselling, it is necessary to connect all sales channels to the centralized order system. Additionally, real-time processing and response must be ensured to guarantee prompt service.

Manage Inventory Effectively

To effectively manage inventory, it is important to maintain a high turnover rate. This means products must sell quickly to minimize waste or spoilage. To achieve this, inventory levels must be closely monitored and sent to staff to help them adjust ordering and production plans.

Minimize the Business Downtime

To minimize business downtime, it is crucial for fast-food restaurants to monitor and maintain equipment such as ovens, fryers, fridges, etc. Regular maintenance and repair work must be carried out to prevent equipment failure, which could lead to delays and frustrated customers.

By using IoT sensors, restaurants can now monitor equipment in real time. However, it is also important to extract alarm information from the monitoring data and promptly synchronize it with staff to ensure timely repairs of equipment malfunctions.

EMQX: Empowering Smart Restaurant with MQTT

Thanks to EMQX's high scalability, you can easily deploy the EMQX MQTT broker in the back-office data center and on tens of thousands of restaurant edge servers. EMQX is adaptive for resources-constraint system environments.

The EMQX MQTT broker is an essential component for below key business systems across the edge servers and the data center:

• Order Management: EMQX is responsible for processing user orders at self-service kiosks and sending them to the order management system at the data center. Meanwhile, EMQX will receive incoming orders from Mobile apps and 3rd-party channels and route them to the restaurants.
• Inventory Management: EMQX processes inventory information updated by staff on handheld devices and synchronizes this information to the back office.
• Equipment Management: EMQX collects and processes the equipment health information collected by IoT sensors and synchronizes this information to the back office.

All terminal devices and edge server boxes are connected through the EMQX broker, which supports multiple protocols, operating systems, and QoS. The edge servers perform basic calculations and processing on requests from customers or staff and connect to the back office through the EMQX broker.

EMQX also supports connection encryption and authentication, ensuring you can switch flexibly between VPN connections and public network environment connections.

The Tech Advantages of Adopting EMQX

EMQX is a powerful enterprise MQTT platform designed for high reliability in large-scale deployments and IoT applications. It can benefit users through the following capabilities:

• High Reliability and Scalability: EMQX utilizes a distributed architecture with high availability and scalability to handle large-scale concurrent messaging. It supports horizontal scaling to accommodate growing IoT devices and data traffic, ensuring system stability.
• Rich Protocol Support: EMQX supports multiple messaging protocols in addition to MQTT. It allows developers to extend to support a variety of industrial protocols to meet their application needs.
• Data Integration: EMQX seamlessly integrates with various data storage services, message queues, cloud platforms, and applications. It can connect to cloud services for remote data transfer and cloud-based analytics.
• Security Guarantee: EMQX provides strong security features, including TLS/SSL encrypted transmission, client authentication, and access control. It supports multiple authentication methods such as username/password, X.509 certificates, and OAuth to ensure secure IoT communications.
• Rule Engine and Data Processing: EMQX has a flexible rule engine for real-time data processing and forwarding. It supports operations such as data filtering, conversion, aggregation and persistence to help users analyze and make decisions based on business needs.
• Monitoring and Management: EMQX provides an intuitive visual monitoring and management interface that allows users to monitor IoT devices and messaging in real-time. Users can view connection status, message traffic and other metrics, as well as perform device management, troubleshooting and system configuration operations.