Customer profile: Khana Khazana

Cratos Hospitality Services has recently installed its EPOS software and head office systems at Khana Khazana, a restaurant in Green Street, East London.

This well-known Forest Gate location, which is close West Ham United's Upton Park Football Stadium, is now also becoming just as famous for another team, its team of chefs, all of whom use authentic ingredients within their wide ranging Indian dishes, ensuring full flavour, perfect taste and complete dedication to the traditions of regional Indian cookery.

Despite the traditionalism of its menu, the dining room is extremely modern, creating a relaxed and stylish look and to further develop this theme the owner Deepak Mohindra, decided to investigate the most appropriate EPOS system to run his restaurant operations to a similar level of efficiency.

These investigations led him to Cratos Hospitality, which was the only company out of three he examined that could offer the hand held ordering system he was looking for. This quite simply and critically had to have finalisation of payment of client bills straight from the hand held, without the need to go to a touch screen till.

All the other systems he looked at required the waiter to retreat to the nearest touch screen till to close off a table and produce the bill. "The other systems I looked at were ok for taking the order but not for paying it off the bill itself," said Deepak.

However he also wanted to take this one step further, he wanted to enable the waiter/ waitress to complete the transaction there, right in front of the customer, with a belt printer producing the final bill, again to save on the time needed, chasing back to a touch screen or the nearest remote printer.

Cratos had the solution to that too, using Socket Mobile 650 hand held ordering devices and the Bixolon SPPR 200 belt printers; they were able, for the first time, to produce bills from the server's belt printer using nothing more than blue tooth connectivity.

Deepak said "Cratos were the only company I could find that were prepared to develop this essential facility for me and it has paid dividends in terms of rapid customer service, and billing right in front of my customers, all of whom have been impressed by the technology and innovation we have shown."

"Because of the improved efficiencies and speed of operation we have seen an increase in turnover of some 3% since we installed Cratos’s Hand Held Ordering and EPOS system" Jeremy Westcott, operations director at Cratos, added "We have been successfully developing leading edge solutions for hand held ordering within the restaurant industry for over 7 years now, at Loch Fyne Restaurants for example, but no one has asked us for localised belt printing before."

"Our software developers looked at the requirement and technically it was not a problem as the Socket had blue tooth connectivity already as standard, so we made a few changes to our own written software and it worked perfectly in tandem with the Bixolon printer, and as it has 8 hours continuous battery life and 14 hours on standby it is ideal for this environment"