Ola Café is the ideal urban escape from the hectic city life. In Honolulu, Hawaii, beachside venues often cater to the whole family by providing an all-inclusive, fun-filled lifestyle experience that seamlessly melds food, drink and music. Helmed by executive chef Liinson Heng, Ola Café offers a menu that includes Hawaiian delights, local favourites, and more.

Ola Café was created for everyone who has a passion for life. The company strives to create experiential destinations and craft awesome experiences for its customers, creating memories that exist beyond its spaces.

Benefits of the system

The staff at Ola Café are trained to be an all-rounder as they must be involved in Back-of-House and Front-of-House duties due to its concept – the takeaway model.

In the absence of appropriate systems, ordering, tracking and reporting are challenging and time-consuming for workers, especially older workers. They would have to manually take down orders, manage information through paper records and consolidate and generate various reports.

Supported by NTUC’s Employment and Employability Institute (e2i) WorkPro Job Redesign grant, Ola Café invested in the implementation of POS, Kitchen and Inventory Management System. Since the implementation, manual workloads are reduced significantly, and tasks made easier. Orders are now made through POS directly to the kitchen for processing as order slips are generated in an orderly manner to help workers process, identify and pass food to the correct customers which minimises human errors from wrong interpretation of any illegible handwriting or communication.

Information on the inventory can also be managed and updated automatically though the system. This reduces stock-taking and tedious work on retrieving important data from paper records or simple tracking system like excel. This also helps to reduces the stress older workers may face at work.

In addition to the implementation via Job Redesign Grant, the Company also purchased buzzers to make work easier for the workers. Buzzers are issued to the customers after they have successfully placed their order with the cashier and instead of waiting and/or stepping out of the store to identify customers, workers may now buzz and have the customers to come by the outlet for collection.

How to company overcome the Covid Phase and updated their plans

The opening of Ola Café at Wild Wild Wet was delayed due to the Circuit Breaker and shortage of construction workers in 2020. With the new restrictions put in place after the Circuit Breaker, their business was definitely impacted. As the outlet is situated within the theme park and serving mostly guests who visits the park for leisure, the company worked closely with NTUC on marketing campaigns to drive park patrons to the store.

With the current heightened alert, the company is working on delivery channels for the outlet at Wild Wild Wet. The company hopes that with delivery availability, Ola will still be able to bring tasty Hawaiian delights to customers’ home during this down period.

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