Food, Technology and Beverage Volume 22

Application of Advanced System – Heichinrou (Chinatown, Yokohama)

In 1887, more than 120 years ago, the first Heichinrou Restaurant opened in Yokohama, in the city’s Chinatown. Today, Heichinrou is Japan’s oldest and most loved Chinese restaurant. 

Over the years, Yokohama and the lives of its citizens have changed greatly. At Heichinrou, however, the quality service and food that their original Yokohama restaurant put into serving each of its customers remains the same.

Now, Heichinrou has 11 branches in Japan, 5 branches in Hong Kong and 1 branch in Thailand. Superior service and excellent food has gained the confidence of customers and generations of customers have become loyal customers to Heichinrou. 

Point-of-Sale (POS) system is one of their management tools to strength their superiorservice level. In spring 2008, Heichinrou Yokohama branch employed Seito Queuing Tag System to manage customer queuing and handle table allocation duties.

There is a touch screen terminal using in the front entrance of the restaurant to handle the customer queuing duty. In addition, each floor has at least one touch screen terminal for service staff to work with the reception so that the staff will clearly know the table occupation status. The system provided by Seito includes 3 major functions. Firstly, the touch screen terminals will show table status (i.e. occupied or not, and how long it is occupied) which is represented by different colours. Secondly, the staff at the reception area may input table requirements from the queuing customers and finally the information of queuing customers (e.g. customer name, number of customers, expected waiting time (assigned by the staff), special request etc.) will be recorded and displayed accordingly. The restaurant also employed a number of wireless PDA terminals to review and change the table status quickly even they are not working near the fixed touch screen terminals. 

“Heichinrou is a famous Chinese restaurant in Japan and Hong Kong. They have good reputation in providing quality service and food to the customers. They believed that information technology can be the great management tool to increase the operation efficiency in the restaurant. Thus, they apply Seito’s tailor-made Queuing Tag System to the Yokohama branch” Hidematsu Yamaguchi, C.E.O. of JCOM said.

* Seito Queuing Tag System is deployed and supported by JCOM – Seito Authorized Reseller in Japan *

Seito Systems Ltd.     www.seito.com.hk