Customer Spotlight - The Alchemist
The Alchemist is one of the leading cocktail bar and restaurant groups in the UK, currently operating 23 unique locations across the country.
Known for innovative, theatrical cocktails and a delicious, creative food menu, the business has gone from strength to strength in recent years!
As part of this continued growth, The Alchemist recently opened their first venue outside of the UK...in Berlin, as part of the vibrant Potsdamer Platz redevelopment.
Despite having an established tech stack and IT team in the UK, the decision was made to explore and implement a new set up for the Berlin location.
Following the selection of Lightspeed for the Point-of-Sale (POS), Paul Jones (Head of IT, The Alchemist) and his team quickly moved to identify a suitable integrated product that could help them with P2P, inventory control, recipe and allergen management. Paul Jones, Head of IT for the Alchemist Group, said:
“Opening up over in a new country, it was pretty clear from the word go it was going to be different from everything that we do in the UK, so we had to figure out which parts of the tech stack that we needed to build up or replace entirely...”
After discussions with various vendors, MarketMan was chosen as the best fit for their requirements, having been recommended by contacts both in the UK and Germany.
“MarketMan is a very intuitive system to use, but the reality of having the time to be able to actually manage the platform and the day-to-day job as well, when we're not used to being a systems administrator….? It became pretty obvious pretty quickly we needed somebody to be helping with it.”
During the early stages of implementing Lightspeed and MarketMan into the new venue, it became clear that there was a lot of work to do, without the internal resource to do it.
Knowing their opening date was fast approaching, Paul was introduced to the team at Twice Baked to help ensure MarketMan was up and running in just two weeks!
Following the launch, it was apparent that some extra help was still needed with maintaining the MarketMan/Lightspeed ecosystem for the forseeable future, and so the decision was made to retain the Twice Baked team...
“Yannis knows so many systems inside out, and luckily for us, Lightspeed as well. He now helps with updates, things like adding buttons on the tills, print streams, combos as well.
So there's added value for not just MarketMan but for us with Lightspeed as well. It's just a one stop shop for us to go to” Paul Jones, Head of IT
The Berlin Alchemist team were able to offload the general maintainence of the MarketMan platform to Twice Baked, freeing up the time of their Head Chef and Head of Bar to do what they do best...make delicious food and drinks!
Key elements of support include:
Management of all price updates
Supplier formatting and mapping
Recipe building for all new menu items, including the build and upload of completely new bar and festive menus
Ongoing inventory list cleaning (duplicate item management)
Lightspeed/MarketMan sync and best practice for both platforms
“Yannis and the team at Twice Baked worked very quickly to understand our business, and to sort through our complex supplier list, especially considering it was in another language...very early on it already felt like he was an extension of the Alchemist team...he understood the pressures we were under and just helped alleviate all of that.” Paul Jones, Head of IT
If you are having problems with your POS/inventory management system set-up, please reach out to us at info@twicebaked.uk for a quick chat to see how we might be able to help!