Nirulas: Food for Thought

From a humble beginning in 1934 with HotelIndia, Nirula's

opened the Central Kitchen and Family style restaurants in the 1980s.

It occupies a place of pride in the Synovate Hotspots Report

2007 as the only Indian food chain amongst MNCs to be in the top five in

India. Even after its acquisition in June 2006 by Navis Capital

Partners, Nirula's has retained its clientele thanks to its customer-first

motto.

Technology has been an integral part of Nirulas

infrastructure. "Computers were introduced for billing at Nirulas

restaurants about 20 years ago and we were the first ones to do so," says

Arun Raj, manager, IT, Nirulas. Even prior to using computers at the

restaurant level, electronic cash registers were used in its restaurants while

computers were used in the head office to keep track of sales and accounting.

The billing system incidentally was a home grown solution and this program was

further evolved to track inventory, and place orders to the central kitchen or

the production unit. As and when new requirements came up, the program was

modified and refined. "On one hand we are working with DOS-based programs

and on the other, we have applications on the .NET technology handling processes

in our central kitchen/production unit," says Arun.

Its all about Food



Nirulas has always leveraged IT to drive its business and has been one of the
earliest restaurant chains to adopt technology. Each of Nirulas restaurants

is equipped with computers and software for billing solution and this includes

Nirulas delivery business. The back office solution is also used in

restaurants to consolidate sales and manage inventory.

For exchange of information between the head office and

restaurants, a communications software has been deployed which manages data

transfer. The production management software consolidates orders from

restaurants as well as third party sales orders, and helps in production

planning in the central kitchen.

"One of the notable uses of technology at Nirulas is the

Internet shopping cart. Since a majority of customers are NRIs, we do a good

amount of business through the shopping cart," explains Arun.

Think Swadeshi



Incidentally, all the software being used in Nirulas today is Indian.

As a growing and expanding company, the management now feels the need to switch

over to a more elaborate and extensive IT set up. "In the process, we came

across many Indian and non-Indian software solutions, and had a tough time

evaluating them as they were pretty competitive in terms of pricing and

features," explains Arun.

Future Plans



With the companys aggressive plans to expand all over India and open as
many as 150 or more restaurants, the existing IT infrastructure required a

complete revamp. "We have decided to change over to newer technologies to

help in the operation of our restaurants as well as our corporate head office

and the central production facility," says Arun. The ERP, POS Solutions,

CRM, customer feedback systems, and the knowledge management portals are some of

the solutions Nirulas is looking forward to.

Since the Internet shopping cart generates a fair amount of

business for the company, it is being rebuilt and will be launched soon. The

website has also been overhauled and a new website launched. In order to better

manage orders generated at various locations and to ensure that orders are

delivered on time, the delivery service will soon be managed by Nirulas from

a central place.

Stuti Das



stutid@cybermedia.co.in