IT serves up a healthy business plan for Red Robin by running VoIP.
IT serves up a healthy business plan for Red Robin by running VoIP
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Back to the main story, Hungry for Automation
To carry traffic among its restaurants and offices, the Denver-based Red Robin hamburger chain relies on a frame-relay network. Data and VoIP traffic split the 128K-bit/sec frame relay connections 50-50.
“The upside is that frame is extremely reliable. The downside is that we pay a bit for that reliability,” says Bill Randall, director of MIS infrastructure at Red Robin.
Still, the ROI is impressive. For instance, credit-card transactions are controlled by the point-of-sale system and run through the network to the Internet for authorization. This saves two or three seconds per transaction, Randall says. “80% of our transactions are credit cards. If you take that two to three seconds times 300 to 400 transactions per restaurant per day, [the time saved] gets pretty significant,” he says.
A Cisco shop, Red Robin IT chose Cisco Call Manager, Cisco Unity and Cisco 2811 routers for the VoIP platform. These routers support Layer 2 switched traffic and old-fashioned Layer 1 connections – needed for the mission-critical point-of-sale system, which hangs in its own subnet, Randall says.
VoIP is run primarily on the WAN, between headquarters, regional offices and the restaurants. However, in June, the IT staff completed its first implementation of a restaurant that runs entirely on VoIP. That Parker, Colo., restaurant uses VoIP over its LAN, too.
VoIP eased call handling and system management. Previously, all phone system changes had to be done on location at each restaurant’s PBX. Today, they are done at the central office. “If a restaurant wants directions in a multilingual format, we can easily support that. We can change recorded hours on the fly. We’re able to give them directories to other restaurants and to regional offices. It’s all the features of a cell phone sitting on your office phone.”
