two years of deployment. By embracing strategic partnerships and digital innovation, telecom operators can unlock new revenue streams, carve out a unique identity in the market, and cultivate enduring relationships with enterprise clients. The question beckons: what is the blueprint to embark on this transformative journey and explore the boundless possibilities that lie ahead?

The Enablement of Applications

By incorporating IoT device management built directly into their applications stack customers can reduce the burden of managing complex integrations to power critical, new services. Going this route can also mean access to enhanced services such as video and audio streaming, recording capabilities, device management, edge distributed processing, authorization, and authentication.

This enablement of applications with 5G and IoT is designed to address the overarching challenge faced by companies regardless of industry: the need to manage and maintain multiple, disparate communication devices, sets of data, and manual processes to record and archive, all within their own systems. With limited transparency it can be difficult for companies to react quickly to situations.

Delving into the Food and Beverage Business

With the right blueprint in place, service providers can make the communications enablement of vertical industry applications extremely successful. However, it can be hard to conceptualize this level of partnership and deviation from the current business model. Let’s look into the challenges and opportunities within the food and beverage industry as an example.

Challenges in this industry can run the gamut. According to the National Restaurant Association, food and labor are the most significant costs for a restaurant, each making up approximately 33 cents of every dollar in sales. Other expenses, namely utilities, occupancy, supplies, general, administrative, and repairs and maintenance, combine to represent about 29 percent of sales.

The pre-tax profit margin for a typical restaurant is approximately 5 percent, but even that is highly susceptible to food issues or labor shortages. It is safe to say this is a challenging space, especially for smaller restaurants.

Cashless Society

The rise of a cashless society post-pandemic requires reliable and cost-effective payment processes. The average guest wants to pay for their meals with their NFC-enabled phone, including when paying for delivery and pickup orders. The restaurants that can offer the widest range of payment options can win over more customers – whether that’s traditional credit cards, chip and pin payments, NFC, or DLT (distributed ledger transactions) such as Bitcoin. The more ways they can process payments the broader the audience they can entice.

Off-premises Dining

While nothing replaces the social experience of a meal in a restaurant with friends, takeout and delivery are still critical parts of the overall revenue of a restaurant. Restaurateurs need solutions that seamlessly integrate off-premises dining capabilities into their existing model while expertly managing production so one channel does not negatively impact the speed or quality of another.

Staffing Crunch

The average annual churn in the restaurant industry is about 75 percent, making the staffing crunch one of the biggest challenges restaurant operators must contend with. Businesses have had to become exceedingly proficient and creative in managing their labor resources. Possible solutions include front office staff such as servers and hosts