Successful US-based restaurant online service now in Sri Lanka
Two Sri Lankans - Mani Kulasooriya and Shanil Fernando - around four years ago floated a corporate body in the US with the name and style ' Leapset' to help restaurants offering the latest innovations in restaurant technology (Silicon Valley restaurant tehnology) to allow restaurant owners to focus on the food, the service, etc.
Leapset partnered with Sysco, one of the largest American multinational involved in marketing and distributing food products in 2013.
This system allows the user to find restaurants, view menus and order online. The entire platform is standalone but can also function as an extension of the POS ( Point of Sales) Leapset serves the US market and its services are now being extended to Sri Lanka too. To introduce the product to Sri Lankan restaurant owners, Leapset organised an awareness session in Colombo last week.
The product is monthly feebased, service oriented model that provides an alternative for restaurateurs reluctant to make substantial capital investments and the simple user friendly platform could be used by anyone.
Mr. Kulasooriya, CEO, said that Leapset draws its resources from the Cloud to ensure consistency and instant access for its customers anywhere, anytime. He said that the system is automatically updated worldwide and can also function via app, ensuring that restaurateurs have at their fingertips everything they need to run their business.
He believed that with restaurants popping up all round Sri Lanka, the country is well positioned for the services offered by Leapset. The market may be small compared to the US, but it is a matter of personal ownership and the pride to launch their product locally, he said.
Leapset plans, he said, to introduce new products and enhancements first in Sri Lanka. Its Flower Road Engineering Centre will house a centre for innovation and customer care. "Running the platform in Sri Lanka will help our employees based in Colombo gain a more practical understanding of what we do," he added.
Mr. Fernando, Senior Vice President - Engineering, said that they have launched three of their platform products in
Leapset partnered with Sysco, one of the largest American multinational involved in marketing and distributing food products in 2013.This system allows the user to find restaurants, view menus and order online. The entire platform is standalone but can also function as an extension of the POS (Point of Sales) Leapset serves the US market and its services are now being extended to Sri Lanka too. To introduce the product to Sri Lankan restaurant owners, Leapset last organized an awareness session in Colombo this week
Sri Lanka - their next generation POS system is its flagship product that allows restaurant owners to minimise costs through a rental system. An integrated hardware and software solution that is splash, crumb and dust proof and its full- sized screen leaves little room for error.
Out of their 350 workforce, 200 are now in Sri Lanka and the balance 150 based in San Francisco and Austin. The company, he said is designed in the US but engineered in Sri Lanka. Over 5,000 US restaurants use their services and each month 150 are added, he asserted, where around US$ 500 million goes through their system each year. There would be 10,000 operations a day, and each transaction has to be executed in half a second.
Jim O'Connor, Senior Vice President, Go to Market, Leapset, speaking on the US restaurant industry said that it is one of the largest in the world and competitors range from McDonald's to sidewalk hotdog vendors. The annual global restaurant sales he said would exceed $709.2 billion. With one million restaurant locations in the US, restaurant sales constitute four per cent of the US GDP.
He pointed out that it is hard to run a restaurant and on an average 50 per cent of restaurants go out of business within three years and indicated that their continuous issues could be eliminated through technical products and services.