Chromosome

Chromosome is an inclusive restaurant in Saint-Étienne: a charity that employs young people with disabilities as team members, supported by around thirty volunteers and a head chef. A fine piece of human machinery, but behind the dining room two administrative jobs were eating an enormous amount of time.

Bookings first. Every evening the vice-president collected the requests from the website and retyped them by hand into a shared spreadsheet. Half an hour a day, and a chance of error at every copy and paste: a booking in the wrong week, a guest counted twice.

Then the volunteer rota. All on paper. You had to go to the restaurant to find out who was coming, and when. The result: days with 7 volunteers and days with 3, when every service needs 5. A volunteer cancelling the night before, and nobody told in time.

Two pieces of custom software, cut to how they actually work, not a generic SaaS they would have had to squeeze themselves into.

A booking platform: requests from the website and the phone land in the same place, in real time. 30 covers, and it closes itself when the room is full. Evenings, weekends and holidays blocked in two clicks. Automatic confirmation by email to the guest. And behind it, the statistics: bookings by day, tables, regulars, allergies, enough to cross with the till and decide well. A form can even be embedded in an existing site or a Google listing.

Simple Team, for the volunteer rota: everyone signs up from their phone in one tap, and the whole team sees the rota in real time. A volunteer drops out? An alert goes to the whole team with the link to take the slot, and the service is saved. The administrator keeps control to balance who is on.

And above all: two weeks of training on site, with the team and the volunteers. Because a tool is not delivered, it is adopted.

The half hour of evening data entry is gone, and with it the copy-and-paste errors. Everything is live, and readable from a phone.

Today more than half of guests book online. The tool runs around the clock, including Sunday evening for Monday lunch. No more guests lost because nobody could pick up the phone between 10am and 3pm.

On the team side, the 35 volunteers took the tool in hand in about a fortnight. The chef sees bookings live and adjusts his preparation, so less waste and lower costs.