Far too often, retailers use technology to slightly accelerate current operations, rather than to leverage technology’s power to radically rethink how business can be done. Fast casual chain Chili’s is trying to do the latter.

Here’s the business issue. Chili’s needs to push convenience and quality. It can’t be as fast as quick-service restaurants (think McDonald’s, Wendy’s) but it can beat them on perceived quality and variety of menu items. It can’t beat local family-owned fine dining on quality, but it can blow them away on price and certainly beat them on speed.

What Chili’s did was to break the meal into its parts and use technology to slash the time for the boring non-value-add parts, such as placing an order, waiting for the check, paying the check and — my least favorite — trying to get the attention of waitstaff to get the aforementioned table, place an order or ask for/receive the check. It concluded that a table-mounted tablet, if it could handle much of the food-ordering and all of the food-paying parts, could decrease the time for the parts of the meal experience it couldn’t improve on and therefore increase the time for the parts that it had a shot at boosting.

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