By Hanah Tabios
Filipino information technology (IT) experts have developed digital solutions that will be offered for free to tourism department-accredited dining establishments to help them revive their businesses under the new normal.
Through a venture project with inclusion tech builder Talino Venture Labs, the Department of Tourism (DOT) and the Department of Trade in Industry (DTI) are set to incorporate the technological demands of the restaurant industry with the health and safety protocols for restaurant dine-in operations to help maintain a COVID-19 free environment.
The Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) agreed to adopt the platform SafePass on June 1. This is an incident management platform for physical establishments that will automate space capacity planning, contact tracing, and protocol enforcement.
It also comes with another application called Dine In which will help restaurants transition to digital ordering, kitchen management, and cashless transactions.
SafePass
The Philippines’ SafePass is an all-digital, contact-free authorizing, business scheduling, and contact tracing solution to help dining businesses operate safely amid the COVID-19 crisis.
Talino Venture Labs CEO Wintson Damarillo said the innovation is a counterpart mechanism leveraged on Singapore’s national digital check-in system called Safe Entry and New Zealand’s NZ COVID tracer application.
But Damarillo said their company is yet to create a simplified version of their apps SafePass Express and Dine In Express where customers can register and transact with their restaurant of choice.
“SafePass really intends to protect customers of restaurants by providing the restaurants the ability to manage and design their space. Whatever regulatory guidelines we give them, they can implement whether it’s 30 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent, or 100 percent of capacity,” Damarillo said.
Once the dining establishment has designed their dining capacity, it will allow people to reserve in that capacity.
The registering customer will be redirected to fill out a digital health declaration form, with the data protected under the Data Privacy Act.
A QR code will then be generated and sent to the customer either via e-mail or through a text message.
Since it is a centralized system, all actions that will be taken will be enforced, Damarillo said.
“At the door... of the establishment, just like in a rapid pass and a version of a checkpoint, the security guard can check the QR code to ensure that that person is allowed to enter the facility and that the facility has enough capacity and the visitor has attested to his health,” he said.
SafePass also monitors the capacity planning of establishments as well as its employee roster. Management can also use it to schedule their business hours and accurately plan the number of their walk-in customers, as well as those making reservations from home.
“All of these are actively monitored, so 100 percent entering the establishment will be contact-traced and will be contactable,” he said.
Contact tracing efforts have been a challenge for the Philippine government following a continuous spike in coronavirus cases in the country.
“Because when we inform them later on that there is a potential incident within a restaurant, all the response on how we handle the COVID-19 incident will be shortened and will dramatically lessen the burden of restaurants,” Damarillo said, adding that all actions undertaken in the application will be directly monitored and reported to the government.
Dine In
The other technology is called Dine In, and it facilitates contact-free transactions.
Damarillo said, “Dine In will allow the restaurants to present their menu digitally. So, no more paper menu.”
The restaurant will instead offer a QR code to be scanned by the customers’ phone QR code scanner. The menu will then appear on their phones and they can order by clicking on their food choices.
“They can order from their table and put in their payment accounts and then the order can be facilitated and delivered,” he said.
Dine In can also be used for pick-up orders.
The two digital applications will be offered for free primarily to DOT-accredited small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
For now, Damarillo said the applications are being made available to some restaurants that are in the process of reopening once they are allowed to.
DOT and DTI are yet to roll out a post-audit mechanism to ensure that all restaurants are following the prescribed health and safety protocols for the dine-in industry.