When food meets technology：Feastogether uses Ares ArgoERP to build NT$10 billion catering enterprise

2026-07-14 05:40:33 Technology

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Taipei, Taiwan, May 17, 2016 - -
Introduction of Feastogether Corp.
Feastogether Corp. is a catering group with annual revenues exceeding NT$2.3 billion, about US$77 million. The missions are to serve customers feasts, to treat them as hosts back home, and to better their life with Feastogether. Feastogether throve on Fuli Restaurant in Taoyuan and recently built several brands including Eatogether, Kaifun, Fruitfulfood, Siam More, Doricious for different needs to bring customers happiness. For the emerging catering empire which continuously grows, how to effectively manage diverse brands and complicated food sources to allow customers to enjoy dishes with confidence is new difficulty to be tackled.

Challenge
In the restaurant business, how many customers and how often they come influence not just revenues but huge data about forecasts for food quantity requirement, purchasing and orders, logistics management, cash flow management and records with which logistics team has to deal. These challenges are coming to Feastogether, a diverse retailing brand. Relying on the past ways like information feedback from branches and manual processing would waste human resources and cause unnecessary loss by errors with larger scale of organization, huger volume of data, and more complicated type of items. Especially after the central kitchen was established, the management only by Excel sheet has slowed the operation process and taken risk in control of material sources with the increasing information about material purchasing.
?ERP is the most important fundamental infrastructure to achieve Just in Time!? I-Hang Chen, the general manager of Feastogether put it. Chen started with financial report output to share the performance of electronic operation that Feastogether reached along the way. He recalled, ?Before ArgoERP implementation, two months were taken to finish financial reports though our base of electronic operation has been established to some extent and many decisions might be postponed unintentionally. Thanks to ArgoERP, our monthly income statement can be finished by 10th each month. The efficiency of information output are improved so that our managers can know production progress and make the best decision in time for our group.?
The Secrets of Feastogether Growth: Create Values and Solve Problems
Feastogether Co., founded on 1971 as Fuli Restaurant, has been established for over forty five years. In 2015, the company had more than NT$2.3 billion (about US$71million) in revenues and up to 3.5 million in the number of customers. The secret to the growth is that the company has kept its spirit in providing higher-quality, more-thoughtful services. With continuously strengthening internal operation process while enhancing staff quality and efficiency, Feastogether aims to bring customer happiness and achieve its missions, which are to serve customers feasts, to treat them as hosts back home, and to better their life with Feastogether.

Software choice dilemma: Cost or stability of service provider?
When referring to the early stage of electronic operations, I-Hang Chen, general manager of the company, said that Feastogether began with using another ERP product; however, its system maintenance and usage were affected due to operational problems at the ERP company shortly after implementing the product, and this resulted in the wasting of manpower and time. Followed by the lesson, Feastogether decided that its ERP system provider should not only offer an applicable software but run a large-scale and stable business in this field. Because the information system implementation lays the foundation of sustainable development, the group have to grow without worries by a well-served ERP team.

When talking about the process of the ERP system provider selection, Yu-Xuan Wang added that Feastogether regarded flexibility and user-friendly experience as the system standards in the final stage; meanwhile, the evaluation included whether the service team was positive, what size the company was, and how stable it run business. Thus, Ares ArgoERP with its consultant team was chosen, as its performances in every aspect are excellent.

Change: upgrade the frontline operation
?The biggest challenge of implementing information system into restaurant business is how to change the frontline workers unfamiliar with the ERP system and to make them accept systematic management?, said An-Xiu Zheng, an experienced consultant responsible for ArgoERP implementation of Feastogether. Regarding this point, Yu-Xuan Wang said that to avoid frontline workers? passive attitude in the early stage, all management-level workers learned the system operation first to train branch staff every day and share with them the advantage of the system usage: to improve efficiency, to accelerate the operation process, and to effectively achieve the group goal of informatization.

Besides mutual communication, the user-friendly and flexible system played an important role. Dean Tsai, the senior manager of Ares, mentioned that adjustment between real execution process and system setup surely happened when the system was operated in frontline working areas. The integration of system functions and real operations through feedback collection and operation improvement is essential for the best performance of electronic operations in the enterprise.

The key to keeping food fresh and with quality
Feastogether established central kitchen in 2012 to keep food quality for each branch. Besides, the company implemented a production system to have material import, production, requisition, and inventory processed by label management and semi-finished food would be sent to branches to cook. For this purpose, ArgoERP is the best tool to precisely control the volume of food import and export, and the works in process.

Moreover, Feastogether insisted that food should cook on the spot to food with the best texture and quality, which is different from other catering companies that cook food in central kitchens and heat it in restaurants. Taking stewed beef with red wine for example, the beef slices are only pickled and cut in the central kitchen and still cook in the restaurant. Cooking on the spot is the freshest! Moreover, Sashimi, a popular dish, was also divided in the central kitchen, sent boneless meats to the restaurant, and sliced by cooks on the spot. Feastogether insists to offer customers the most delicious food by the central kitchen with ArgoERP in control of each dish quality.

The assistant manager of administrative department at Feastogether Zhong-Yan Wu said that the process of delivering semi-finished products to branches for cooking is complicated and generated huge information, so errors would happen if the company only relied on manual operations and hardcopies. As a result, through ArgoERP, the volume of import and export could be precisely controlled to correspond with correct information about purchasing, inventory, and production to make system adaptive to when any process is changed.

More introduction about ArgoERP：http://argoerp.ares.com.tw/en/