This podcast episode features an exciting announcement about the integration of Nomad Go's innovative inventory management technology with PAR Technology's Data Central platform. David Greshler, CEO of Nomad Go, and Paul Rubin, Chief Strategy Officer at PAR, discuss how their collaboration aims to revolutionize the restaurant industry's approach to inventory counting. With Nomad Go's solution, operators can count their inventory more efficiently and accurately using just an iPhone or iPad, significantly reducing the time and effort traditionally spent on manual counting. The conversation highlights the challenges faced during the integration process and emphasizes the importance of data integrity and reliability. Listeners will gain insights into the future of restaurant technology, the benefits of frequent inventory checks, and the impact of emerging technologies such as AI and augmented reality on the hospitality sector.

Takeaways:

• The integration of Nomad Go with PAR Technology significantly simplifies the inventory counting process for restaurants.
• Using augmented reality and AI, Nomad Go enables users to count inventory with a simple scan.
• Both companies emphasize the importance of accuracy and time savings in inventory management for restaurants.
• Frequent inventory checks can lead to better management of food waste and theft detection.
• The partnership between Nomad Go and PAR Technology reflects a growing trend of technological collaboration in the restaurant industry.
• Customers can expect enhanced data insights and operational efficiency from the new integration.

Links referenced in this episode:

• gainadvisors.com
• nomadgo.com
• skipkimpel.com
• magicgate.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Growth Advisors International Network
• NomadCo
• PAR Technology Corporation
• Nomad Go
• PAR Data Central
• Brink

You are listening to the Tech Chef Podcast.

This show is powered by Growth Advisors International Network where travel and hospitality companies come to grow.

For more information please visit gainadvisors.com hi, this is David Greshler, CEO and co founder of NomadCo.

And this is Paul Rubin with Par and we're here with Skip Kimple and the Tech Chef Podcast.

Off Premise Strategy, Business Continuity.

How about a taste test of restaurant technology, drive through or curbside mobile apps or AI?

It's all on the menu, cooking up for the date.

It's a recipe for success.

You're in good hands with a Tech Chef.

Pick up.

Plan to be your best strategize with the Tech Chef.

Welcome back to the Tech Chef.

This is your host Skip Kimple, streaming to you from sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

This show took a little bit of a hiatus to rearrange things and boy have we done that.

I have a future episode coming up to talk all about the changes you have seen on LinkedIn and how this will impact not only the growth of this show, but the range and expertise of guests and knowledge you will gain and benefit from.

I am also thankful and would like to announce the new sponsorship of this show by the Growth Advisors International Network, otherwise known as gain.

You will be hearing quite a bit about them in the near future.

Whether you're a first time listener or a loyal regular.

Each episode we dive into the world of restaurant, hotel and hospitality technology, serving up a delicious mix of insights, trends and stories from industry experts, cutting edge products and tech innovators.

Whether you're a tech enthusiast, curious about food, technology and hospitality breakthroughs, or just someone who loves to stay ahead in the tech world, this podcast is your ultimate recipe for success.

Join us as we explore how technology is transforming the industry to increase profits, reduce cost and make your company more efficient.

Get ready to ignite your taste for tech and satisfy your appetite for innovation.

Today is special because we are making a huge announcement on an integration.

It is not very often something like this makes headlines, but this one indeed is worthy of the attention it is getting.

Joining the show, I am honored to have two guests.

David Greshler is a 20 plus year startup entrepreneur with experience founding and building successful businesses from scratch, developing and implementing product and market strategies and creating awareness to generate revenue.

He founded two tech startups that were successfully acquired.

He holds six patents in the virtualization and virtual reality space.

Now he is the CEO and co founder of Nomad Go, where he's focused on Transforming the supply chain by radically simplifying the way inventory is collected using Nomadgo's spatial AI.

Also, I am very excited to have Paul Rubin join us in the conversation.

Paul is the Chief Strategy Officer at PAR Technology Corporation.

As the visionary founder and CEO of brinc, a leading POS software platform, he combines decades of restaurant software expertise with technical prowess and consistent innovation.

His strategic leadership amplifies Par's standing, propelling the company forward in an ever evolving landscape of restaurant technology.

With a distinguished career marked by entrepreneurial success, Mr.

Rubin shapes the future of Par with a unique blend of expertise, insight, and relentless commitment to excellence.

Together, these two guests are going to blow your mind with the possibilities that their products bring to the marketplace.

And as Par likes to say, better together.

Joining the show today, we have David Greshler and Paul Rubin.

Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining the show today.

David, you're probably a little less known within the restaurant community.

I know you've had some pretty big splashes in the media lately, but tell us a little bit about yourself and the product that you represent.

Sure, Skip, and thanks for having me.

Nomad Go solves a problem that has been around since the dawn of time that nobody ever thought there'd be a solution for.

And that is the problem of counting inventory with your fingers.

Right.

People have simply done it that way because there's no other way to do it.

And what we do is we change that.

We make it so that with a simple scan of an iPhone or an iPad, you can automatically count your entire inventory from, you know, shelving to make lines and everything in between.

And that includes not just recognizing an item that's on a shelf, but also knowing how many items are there in that row and wrapping it all together, being able to deliver that data.

And of course, then.

And that's what our integration with PAR is all about.

Being able to send that data seamlessly with a click of the button to PAR Data Central so that then folks can easily order.

But also, you know, combine our data with PARS data to get a whole world of new insights about their inventory.

Excellent.

That's a great overview.

Paul Rubin, you're kind of a legend in the industry.

I don't know anybody who doesn't know you, but for those who don't, just a quick intro and tell us a little bit about PAR and their ecosystem.

And you've had a lot of announcements over the past couple of years.

Today's a little bit different because we don't normally talk about or there normally isn't a big splash about integration of a particular product.

It's normally a product acquisition we hear coming from the PAR team.

So tell us a little bit about, you know, what the PAR ecosystem looks like and kind of your background.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for having me on the show and thanks for the kind words.

I will say that I have been in the industry for a very long time.

I do have many folks that I know out there.

I am the chief strategy officer for par and I had product for our operator cloud, which includes our solutions that are generally within the four walls of the restaurant.

And I would say, you know, we have done a lot of acquisitions.

We've grown rapidly in that way and will continue to grow both organically and inorganically.

And we came in with an ethos of being all about integrations.

We think that we show up best when we support our customers needs.

And so we've always been about bringing more and more integrations to the table.

And this integration with Nomad GO and our data central product is an extension of that.

So what were some of the main goals and motivations behind specifically teaming up with Nomad go?

Well, personally, I would tell you I remember the days in my early career of walking through a restaurant with a count sheet and doing manual counts.

And you know, the.

I think anybody you ask that does inventory in restaurants today knows that it's.

It's a little bit of a tedious exercise.

It involves going through every part of the restaurant, making sure you understand the amount of product you have in each part, whether it's the walk in or the refrigerator next to the grill and then entering it in the computer and finding out if you made an error.

With Nomad Go, as David referenced a moment ago, it's all very automated now, right.

The computer uses the camera and other instruments to help you count that inventory automatically.

It makes you more accurate and it makes it much more expedient, allows you to get in and out and get it done very, very quickly.

Were there any specific challenges faced during this integration process?

And if so, how are they addressed?

And maybe I'll go back to you, David, in regards to that, there really.

Weren'T any big challenges.

At the end of the day, what we report is effectively what people have been reporting on previously, which is, I saw, you know, five lemonades, I saw, you know, two bottles of this type of syrup or whatever it is.

And so, you know, the Final report is actually very straightforward and fits, you know, fit right into the way PAR consumes that data day.

So it actually was a tremendously easy integration for the two of us to work on.

And you know, at the end of the day, we just want to make this easy for customers, right?

We want them to be able to do a quick scan, a quick click, and then easily be able to see the results right inside of data central.

So Paul, this goes back to you.

If you're a data central customer right now, I mean, does this just completely replace the inventory taking process that you currently have?

And it's literally just a click of a button and, and you're importing data from Nomad Go.

What does, what does it look like from a customer perspective?

Yeah, so that's mostly true.

I mean, we do still have to do our inventories.

We, we haven't found a way to avoid doing the inventory yet.

What this does is this simplifies and accelerates the process.

Right, with the as, as David references, right?

You, you, you do your scan of the restaurant and it's done all the counting for you and it's, and it's very, very accurate.

So it's fast and it takes what used to be a long errand and simplifies it and makes it much, much easier and much faster to accomplish.

So once again, from an operator's perspective, obviously time is a big issue in regards to taking inventory and the accuracy piece.

I mean, what aspects of realization around those two pieces provide value to the operator?

So what you touched on is absolutely right.

Time savings is huge.

We've seen up to 10 times faster with Nomad Go.

Right.

Process is simplified.

Up to now, everybody's had to have a sheet to shelf process, right, where they, they need to assign specific items to specific shelves.

Then it's driven there and if they don't see it there, then they have to go peck around and all that, that all goes away.

Because effectively what we're doing is we're just scanning the entire restaurant and we might see, you know, five tetras of lemonade on shelf one.

And because we know this is reality, you know, there might be two of them stuck on shelf two.

Well, we'll report on the fact that they were in both shelves, but at the end of the day we'll say, yeah, there were seven lemonades.

So this whole, you know, highly structured process of assigning skus to specific locations doesn't happen anymore.

It's it, you know, we can capture anything anywhere.

So that, that's a big Piece of it.

Because actually that there's a lot of, you know, sort of work that people have to do just to prepare to do inventory that goes away.

Probably the most important is accuracy.

And because that at the end of the day, if your data is not accurate, then why place the order right?

I mean, and we all know this leads to food waste or out of stock.

And if it's out of stock, that means you've just lost revenue.

So this ability to be highly accurate is a critical piece.

And I'm going to sort of explain that it's actually made up between the AI and the human.

What I mean by that is that obviously when you scan, we're, you know, we recognize the lemonade and we count the row and great, so you got that number.

But as we all know, AI isn't perfect, at least not yet.

And so the fact of the matter is there's a human behind that phone or that iPad.

And so what we've built is an interface that allows people to sort of check to make sure that when you're scanning those numbers or the SKU itself is right.

And we've got this great, you know, video, kind of almost like a video game like interface where you can tap to make these small adjustments.

Or if, you know, say there's a box sitting way on the other side of the restaurant and you really don't want to go there to scan it, you can actually add it to the digital environment using your voice.

And so by combining the AI and the human, that's how you get to this incredibly high accuracy.

And, and I'll add one more thing.

People hate doing inventory, okay?

They just hate it.

It's mind numbing.

They have to do it late at night, all those things.

And part of this is really fun.

What we've done technically is combined computer vision.

So we, we recognize the bottle of ketchup.

You know, with spatial intelligence, we can count how many are in the row.

Combined with augmented reality, which means instantaneously, when we see that catch up and we figure out that there's five, we place like an augmented reality medallion on the, on the catch up so that they know, okay, that's done, I don't have to count that anymore.

And so it's actually kind of like a fun thing, especially if people have had to be counting with their fingers up to now.

So it's speed, it's accuracy, but it's also making your employees just enjoy their job when it's counting them to mandatory rather than really the last thing of the day.

That they hate.

Actually, I'm going to keep this question to you, David.

So I'm hearing a lot of technology, which I am honing in on in my new position at Magic Gate and Gain Advisors, and that is all about emerging technologies around augmented reality, virtual reality, AI, and leveraging all of those pieces together.

As soon as I hear you describing the process of how your product is taking inventory, I'm also envisioning some other, I don't want to say complexities, but some more areas that might prevent this to go and be available to every operator.

I'm assuming you'd have to take a digital twin or a scan of that inventory room to begin with, correct?

No.

So I know, because I'm sure you've looked at a lot of other technologies.

You know, they either require sort of the scan.

They're also often sending, you know, video images up to the cloud to process everything.

We know that will never work at scale.

In qsr, there are little to no networks.

You can't spend a lot of money on a lot of hardware to do all that.

All those things are huge gating factors to be able to scale.

Our device is a commercially available device.

The iPhone, the iPad, the Pro versions.

Right.

That's all you need.

Everything you see when we're scanning, you know, the computer vision, the spatial intelligence, and then the, you know, augmented reality, all is happening on that device.

The only data being retrieved and sent to the cloud is effectively the latest SKU list, which we're getting, you know, from PAR Data Central, and then the count, you know, like I said, we've got the five lemonades and the two bottles of syrup.

That is effectively a text file.

It's more complicated than text file, but it's effectively a lightweight JSON that gets sent to Data Central.

So everything is on device, and that's what makes this highly scalable.

Got it.

So this is available, you know, to go downstream.

This is not for your Tier one, only for your Tier one customers out there.

This is.

This can go downstream quite a bit.

Absolutely.

Okay, Paul, I have a question for you.

Can you elaborate a little bit on the data sharing mechanisms in place between Nomad Go and PAR Technologies and how both companies are ensuring that the data integrity has integrity and is reliable?

Yeah, absolutely.

I was going to bring this up a little earlier, but I waited.

You know, Data Central, of course, knows about prior inventory counts, it knows about theoretical usage, and it knows about waste that's occurred in the restaurant.

So we do our own validation on.

On the data that we receive from Nomad Go, of course we provide them the list of things that can be counted, etc.

But when they provide us the counts back, Data Central will go ahead and validate and let you know if there are any unexpected variances in the data being reported that you might need to go recheck.

I think restaurants are, the early adopters, are seeing as much as 15 hours of savings in doing those inventories.

So there's a big value in why we're investing in this as well.

And David, I know before Par, you've been working on this product for quite a long time and I'm sure you have many customers and case studies under your belt already.

I don't know if this is such a new integration.

I don't know if Par and Nomad Go already have a combined customer that you can talk about.

But can you tell me, David, a little bit about, you know, some success stories that you've seen?

I don't know if you can talk about any of the clients.

I'm finding a very weird scenario, the more disruptive technology out there.

A lot of companies are keeping this information to themselves because they truly believe it's a competitive advantage, which is unusual for our technology space in the restaurant area because we've always been normally a very sharing community of what we're doing and how we're doing it.

And I'm kind of seeing a little bit of a step back on that, a lot of NDAs in place not to even talk about it.

So having said all of that, which I probably talked way too long about that, are there case studies that you can talk about where you, they're amazing customers and have amazing stories to tell?

Well, absolutely.

And, but you're right, you know, inventory is the heart along with, of course, labor and product of a company.

And so it is a very strategic part of, you know, how a company operates.

And as a result, I think that's why you're seeing some of this sort of companies wanting a little bit to hold it close to the, to the, to the chest right now.

But having said that, you know, where we started really, really was with very large scale companies, right?

And because this pain is, it's, it's a pain for everybody.

But at scale, where you're trying to optimize, you know, and even one little click makes a huge, you know, financial difference.

This is where the, you know, those folks really see tremendous benefit to this.

And so again, it comes back to labor savings.

And interestingly, with labor savings, what we seen is they'll say, oh, Great.

We, you know, you can do it ten times as fast.

But and then, of course, there's the obvious, like, oh, that means we can reallocate the labor, this and that.

But the interesting thing is that a lot of people then begin to go, we can do this more frequently.

And.

And actually, that is where it often lands because.

Because it takes so long for people to do inventory, folks are like, well, we just can't do it that frequently.

But because they don't do it that frequently, they don't have refreshed data, and therefore, that issue of accuracy really kicks in.

Right.

They don't have enough data that's there repeatedly.

And so moving it and making it more frequent instead of say, you know, once every, you know, or maybe twice a week, being able to do it three, four times a week because it's so fast gives them a pulse of what's really going on out in their stores.

So if I could add to that, that really helps you find out, you know, what, which shift and which folks are having problems with waste or possibly theft as well.

So there's huge advantage to doing that more frequent inventory.

David, are you seeing any similar technologies being developed on the.

On your heels?

Because, you know, once you have one successful company out there, you know that you're going to have repetitious competition out there.

Are you starting to see that at all?

Well, we've seen sort of similar ideas floated out there, but often, probably the biggest distinction is none of them can count, right?

They can just do out of stock.

So when you see the word out of stock, that tells you that they're not able to count.

It's also worth noting that we have been issued a patent in the space, and so we've got quite a protective environment around that, and that was issued this year.

Paul, obviously, par saw the opportunity here with this partnership to position both companies in the market.

Compared to competitors offering similar technologies.

How do you feel this places you above some of your competitors out there?

Well, I think I would just say that, you know, we're always paying attention to technology.

We're always watching to see what's possible.

And, you know, I think we're proud to say that we saw what Nomad Go was doing, and we were the first right to.

To establish a partnership in the restaurant industry with them, whether we can develop the technology ourselves or partner.

You know, our goal is to bring as much useful technology to our customers as fast as possible so that they can get value out of it.

And that's definitely what we see in this Relationship.

We didn't develop the technology ourselves, but that's okay.

We found a great partner, and we moved quickly to get that out into the hands of our customers.

I would echo that.

You know, it's been amazing working with par.

We got this integration done fast.

We've been testing it with, you know, customers, and the vision that, you know, PAR has and we have is just highly complimentary.

Skip, I might add to that.

I think as PAR has grown through acquisition, some people might have become concerned that, you know, we don't play nice in the sandbox, that we want to own all the technology, and this is a useful platform to say that that's not the case.

While we do continue to grow our company, we absolutely are in the business of partnering so that restaurants get the highest value possible.

Yeah, that's a great point.

David, are there any future developments that you can talk about or futures planned to further enhance your product or the integration between the two on our product side?

Right.

You know, the world is messy.

Back of houses are even messier.

Right.

And so, you know, this notion that, oh, you've got this really clean back of house and everything's either on a shelf or in a fridge, you know, or in a make line.

It's just not.

Not reality.

And our job is to continue to be able to digitize that messiness.

So you're going to see more and more innovations from us where we're capturing all those little details, you know, to be able to support your entire inventory over time.

Like, one of the things we've rolled out in the last couple months is the ability to look inside a box, Right.

And a lot of people want to know, well, I've got my whatever it is, my butter patties, my whatever, but I've only got, you know, it's only one third full.

So the ability to look in a box and give you feedback on, well, those are butter patties, but there's only a third left.

That's just an example of the kind of messiness and detail that our platform has to support.

And so you'll see more and more of that.

I mean, our vision is any item anywhere without changing anything.

Now, with par, I think count is just the beginning.

Right.

If you think about Data Central, Data Central is collecting all kinds of information.

So when you count, when you can all of a sudden combine our highly accurate counts with Data Central's data, the world's the limit.

This question goes to both of you, and we'll start off with Paul first.

How are you measuring the success of this integration both internally and in terms of client satisfaction.

Yeah, I would say we're looking to make sure that the customers get value.

So we want to make sure that they're saving time on the inventory and we are seeing that.

We want to make sure that the accuracy is going up.

As mentioned earlier, Data Central would stop somebody if they entered a value that isn't logical or doesn't make sense.

But the less that happens, the better.

If the account can be accurate and correct the first time, that's another step or another trip back to where the item is stored that's saved.

And so I think for us, efficiency is the name of the game.

Right.

We want to make inventory as easy and convenient as possible so that they can do it as often as possible and really use Data Central for what it's best at.

You know, keeping track of the inventory, highlighting things like excess waste or theft and ensuring that there's enough product on the shelves to meet demand.

And we see all those things happening in this partnership.

And David Paul brought up a very good point about, in Data Central there is these trigger points where if something is entered wrong, fat fingered in whatever, you know, there's notification.

Does your system have something similar to that before it even passes it back to Data Central?

Well, we have a.

So if you scan, right, you can scan, let's just say you scan a shelf, you can review that the numbers on that shelf, you can, you can, you know, kind of click on the shelf itself and then what you see are the icons for, for each item and you see how many orders have been placed and you can actually do that right before you submit.

It'll kind of bring up everything that's there.

So what's nice is there's that human check happening, you know, right before things are sent.

And then as Paul pointed out, there's that additional check with, you know, algorithms that make sure that.

Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to, I meant, I meant to order, you know, five, you know, catch ups and instead I ordered five cases of ketchups.

Right.

So being able to get that reality check is really important.

So I think it's great because we have the kind of a human on our side and you know, the algorithms on par side.

And if Skip, if I can point out we're all aware of how increased food costs have affected restaurants and so, you know, anything and everything we can do to help them better manage their inventory just has, I think it always has had value.

It has so much more value now given, given the changes.

And Paul, for Potential clients already in Data Central that are interested in adopting this integrated solution.

What onboarding and support processes are there in place to ensure a smooth transition?

Well, for us, it's just a matter of enabling the integration with Nomad Go and then you work as your Nomad Go team to enroll all of your products and make them available.

And I'm sure David could speak to that part of it better than I could.

David?

Yeah.

What is, what does that onboarding look like and what's the average time to get a client onboarded?

Well, it depends on the scope and the number of SKUs and so on.

But effectively what we do is we'll work with the customers to determine what are the items that they've gotten their back of house.

We do a combination of different approaches depending on what the SKU is.

Boxes go very fast.

You know, other items might need to be modeled, which is a very simple process that we've got.

And then of course, what we do is we query our state of Central for The list of SKUs that we're supposed to be looking for.

And obviously we all know those get updated over time.

So being able to adapt to those updates over time and then finally report it on the back end.

Gentlemen, I thank you so much for your time today.

This is a fascinating conversation.

Hopefully it has given the audience some opportunity to hear about some new technology and hopefully people are excited to hear that it is integrated and it is being integrated as we speak into customer situations to make the inventory problem and the inventory headache go away and almost gamify it at some point.

So thank you so much for your time and I look forward to having you guys back on the show.

You have to admit that was a big announcement that provided a lot of great information and some wonderful conversation around the technologies we are facing in this new world of hospitality innovation.

A huge thank you to David and Paul for joining the show and the team that pulled it all together.

A visual demo of the Nomad Go product, visit Nomad Dash go.

Com.

I will be sure to include a link in the show notes.

By the way, this is only the starting point of what you will be seeing produced here on the Tech Chef.

If you would like to reach out to me or the show, you can do so via everything social@SkipKimple or everything @ Magic Gate.

This includes X, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

You can also go to the website@SkipKimple.com for all of the archive shows and show notes.

They'll also be posted there and you can hear all of these new episodes on the Magic gate website@magicgate.com and of course you can always email me@skipagicgate.com Next week we break out a whole new level of technology many of you may or may not be already familiar with.

Joining me will be John Cunningham, who holds many titles including President of virtualware, Founder of Spatial Synergy, and Chief Operating Officer of the VRAR Association.

We are going to be talking all about the topic of using XR in the enterprise marketplace and how hospitality can benefit from these cutting edge technologies.

What is xr, you might ask?

Well, I'll give you a hint.

It stands for Extended Reality Search for the hashtag wired up on LinkedIn.

If you would like to get a heads up about this dynamic world of innovation now, today is Election Day.

If you are listening from the good old US Of A and have not gone out and cast your vote yet, please do so.

It is such an important part of who we are as Americans and especially this election.

Do like I did.

Vote with the intention that it comes down to one vote and your vote is the decision maker.

By the time this show comes out next Tuesday, we will have a new president.

Half of you will like the outcome, the other half will not.

We must unite as a country and respect the process and continue on as a strong, healthy democracy.

Well, it is time for me to go this week and between now and next Tuesday.

Please stay safe, stay healthy and stay hungry.

My friends.