Restaurants have hundreds of options when it comes to point-of-sale (POS) systems alone. Chris Abrams, the director of innovation for Dewey's Pizza, said his company uses Olive, a collaborative software for technology solutions, to streamline its RFP process and select the best vendors to meet its business needs.

Abrams said prior to utilizing Olive, he and his team at Dewey's Pizza, a restaurant chain with 25 locations across the U.S., would use spreadsheets, emails and meetings to try to gather information about the technology and vendors that were available for their business.

"I was looking for a platform that we can easily store, monitor and distribute needs requirements out to vendors and internally be able to rate vendors' responses, and Olive seemed to be the right tool," Abrams said in a video shared by Olive.

Abrams said he and his team wanted to "centralize all of our needs requirements." He said that when they would try to rely on spreadsheets and emails, "it never really got to an efficient point where we know exactly what we need to do, and the vendor knows exactly what we need. So instead of issuing a large, formal RFP, we found Olive. Olive simplified – took an agile approach – to the RFP process and needs requirements, which was great." Abrams said Olive was "easy to understand" for members of Dewey's marketing, operations, IT and HR departments.

Abrams highlighted the benefit of the collaboration Olive allows between different departments, saying in the video that Olive "allows us to come together and sync on the needs" and "allows everybody within our organization to contribute." He also emphasized the clarity that Olive brings to the process, saying that the tool "helps define to the vendors exactly what we're looking for." Abrams noted that if vendors need any clarification, that can take place directly through Olive rather than through emails or meetings.

Abrams said that using Olive reduced the amount of time it took for Dewey's to find a next-day pay vendor from several months to a couple weeks. He said Olive has been key in achieving Dewey's "digital transformation."

"Nowadays, restaurants are constantly changing and leveraging new technology to be able to deliver better experiences to customers and also efficiencies within the restaurants, and at Dewey's, we're always looking at getting better at delivering our experience to the customer and our experience of culture to our employees," Abrams said.

A report from LS Retail states that choosing the wrong POS system can "destroy your business" by worsening customers' experiences and decreasing employee productivity.