Digitalising an iconic heritage brand to improve customer service
Tip Top Curry Puff”, the famous home-grown brand that many Singaporeans are familiar with, started in 1979. Tip Top Curry Puff launched its first outlet in the bustling heartland of Ang Mo Kio, where it gradually established itself as an iconic heritage brand renowned for making delicious traditional curry puffs using local Asian flavours.
Till today, Tip Top Curry Puff is still passionate about making curry puffs by hand! The fillings of every curry puff are skilfully blended with 18 spices, premium potatoes, and fresh ingredients, which is wrapped in its signature pastry dough. The edges of the curry puff dough are moulded into a spiral pattern and deep fried before serving, guaranteeing a rich and flavourful experience in every bite.
Currently, Tip Top Curry Puff has more than 30 staff (with a strong Singaporean core and the majority being mature workers) with 6 retail outlets located island-wide in locations such as Bugis Junction, Tampines Century Square, and One Raffles Place.
Searching for ways to “puff” up productivity
Even though making curry puffs is a labour-intensive process, the company actively explored other areas where technology could help to improve their business productivity. There were a few areas and processes were challenging and time consuming for its mature staff due to the lack of appropriate systems such as:
1. Point-of-Sale (POS)
Tip Top Curry Puff’s old POS system could only support English language with no display of product images. This normally inconvenienced staff who were not well versed in English as they would need to seek help from their peers or memorise the items to key in by hand.
2. Inventory management and generation of sales reports
Tracking and generation of inventory and sales reports were done manually by paper recording, resulting in common human errors arising from miscommunication and misinterpretation from illegible handwritten records. For inventory management, staff needed to conduct regular stock-taking to ensure there were sufficient ingredients and products for every outlet.
The company needed to digitalise the processes of manual documenting and calculating daily sales during closure as they were time consuming and applied stress to mature employees, said Mr Deon Goh, Strategic Projects Senior Executive with All Best Foods.
3. Integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system
Without any analytical data and reports due to a lack of a proper integrated customer relationship management system, staff were unable to retrieve the customers’ information and purchase data to plan effective and robust promotional events.
Partnering with e2i to help staff
In view of the above challenges which affected staff productivity, All Best Foods partnered with NTUC’s Employment and Employability Institute (e2i) under the WorkPro Job Redesign initiative to procure and onboard technological solutions to ease the workload of their staff, Goh said. The company implemented a new POS, E-Ordering, Inventory, Central Kitchen, Customer Relationship and Store Purchase Inventory Management system.
The new POS system currently supports multi languages such as Malay and Mandarin. It is also enhanced with relevant product images for staff to easily identify the product sold to ease keying in of orders. Staff can easily manage and update information on the inventory and customers’ data automatically through the system.
Outlet managers and management are now able to autogenerate sales information easily from the mobile app which comes with the CRM system. The data can also be tabulated easily in the desired formats within minutes for analysis to optimise sales and marketing strategies.
Ms Cynthia Toh, Area Manager at All Best Foods, said “I’m happy with the implementation of these improvements. I can spend more time interacting and understanding my staff across the multiple outlets now that I spend lesser time worrying about documentation. My staff gets to go back earlier, so everybody is more motivated at work!”.
Through digitalisation of these processes, Deon Goh, Production Manager at All Best Foods Pte Ltd shared that the efficiency and effectiveness of staff have increased, and staff can now focus on providing the best service to the customers. He added “with higher productivity, the company carried out increments, promotions and job enlargement exercises that benefitted staff with better work prospects.”
To learn more about e2i’s business solutions, visit https://e2i.com.sg/businesses/
To learn more about Tip Top Curry Puff, visit:
Website: https://www.tiptopcurrypuff.com/
Instagram Link: – https://www.instagram.com/tiptopcurrypuff/
Facebook Link: https://www.facebook.com/TipTopSG
Photos courtesy of All Best Foods Pte Ltd.
