case study · hospitality
A regional restaurant group asked us to swap a legacy PMS for Toast across five sites. Each site had a different layout, a different printer set, a different cellular failover provider, and a different chef who didn't want to be the test case. We staged in our shop, deployed at midnight, trained on the floor, and shipped without missing a Friday rush.
five-restaurant group · Madison · 2026
01
The previous PMS was end-of-life. The vendor had stopped patching it; the credit-card terminals were on their second compliance audit warning. The owner needed off the platform but was terrified of losing a service shift. ' If we lose Saturday brunch, we lose the year' was the brief.
02
We staged every terminal in our shop first — printers paired, KDS wired, menus loaded, staff PINs provisioned. Each site got a dry-run with a cardboard menu in the back office before going live. Then we deployed one site per Tuesday night, leaving the legacy system as a hot fallback for the first weekend after each cutover. By week six, every site was on the new platform and the legacy hardware was in our cage.
03
Each site got a 5G hotspot wired into a managed switch alongside the wired internet, with the POS configured to fail over within 30 seconds. We tested it by yanking the wired Ethernet at the start of one Friday and timing the recovery. The terminals barely blinked. In the year since, two sites have lived through ISP outages on a Saturday — both kept running on cellular without a missed order.
04
The biggest source of friction wasn't the technology — it was the printer paper. Every site had been running a different roll size, and the receipt printers we standardized on needed a slightly narrower roll. We bought a year's supply for each location and put a recurring delivery in place so no manager would have to remember.
05 / outcomes
The numbers we held ourselves to. Reviewed quarterly with the client.
06 / next
if it shipped, we owned it. start to finish.
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