Openings & Rollouts
The IT critical path for opening a restaurant, hotel or club
A week-by-week IT timeline for opening a restaurant, hotel or club, from circuit lead times and cabling first fix to soft launch and day-one support.
IT for a new venue opening sits on a critical path of roughly six months, and the leased line is almost always the longest lead item on it. MicroNet Global, a hospitality IT specialist with 550+ projects delivered across 15+ countries, plans openings backwards from the first service so connectivity, cabling and systems are live before staff arrive.
The item that most often delays an opening is the least glamorous one. A fibre order placed in week eight instead of week twenty-four is the reason a venue opens on a 5G router, taking cards slowly, with a manager apologising to a queue.
What is the IT critical path for a venue opening?
The IT critical path is the sequence of technology tasks whose dates cannot slip without moving opening day. It runs from site survey through circuit ordering, comms room agreement, containment and cabling, hardware procurement, systems build, payment onboarding, testing and soft launch, to day-one support and handover. Every other IT task can flex around it; these cannot.
The circuit is the problem, and it is ordered too late
A business-grade leased line is not a broadband order. It can require a survey, a landlord wayleave, civils works, and a delivery window measured in months. On a shell-and-core fit-out the address may not exist in the carrier's database yet, which adds weeks before anyone has picked up a spade.
IT is usually engaged after the lease is signed and the designer is already drawing, by which point the circuit has to be squeezed into whatever time remains. The honest response is not optimism; it is ordering on day one and building a fallback in parallel.
That fallback has to be real. Bonded 4G/5G with a proper router and a tested failover configuration will get a venue trading, but it will not comfortably carry full guest Wi-Fi, back-of-house video and a busy card estate at once. [[Networking, Wi-Fi and connectivity]{.underline}](about:blank) design should include the day-one degraded mode, not just the finished state.
Where IT sits in the construction programme
IT is downstream of the landlord, the main contractor, the M&E contractor and the designer. Very little is achievable by the IT team acting alone, which is why a venue opening is as much programme management as engineering.
Two decisions have to be made before walls go up. The first is the comms room location: central enough for cable runs to reach, away from kitchen heat and wet areas, lockable, with space to work in front of the rack. The second is power and cooling to that room, an M&E line item that has to be in their drawings rather than a request after commissioning.
The cabling follows the contractor's first fix and second fix windows, when ceilings and walls are open. Miss that and the choice is chasing finished plasterboard or running trunking across a designed interior. Neither conversation with a designer ends well.
The week-by-week critical path
The table below suits a mid-size restaurant or boutique property. A hotel with a full PMS, door locks and in-room entertainment needs the front end stretched. The dependencies do not change.
| Weeks before | Workstream | Depends on | Risk if late |
|---|---|---|---|
| 26--24 | Site survey, requirements, IT budget and design brief | Lease signed, concept drawings | Every downstream task compresses into the final month |
| 24--20 | Connectivity ordered: primary circuit plus backup path | Confirmed trading address, landlord wayleave | Opening on mobile broadband with restricted service |
| 20--16 | Comms room location, power and cooling agreed; containment and cabling design issued | M&E drawings, contractor programme | Remedial works, no cooling, kit in a cupboard |
| 16--12 | Hardware ordered; PMS and EPOS contracts signed | Design sign-off, purchase order approved | Stock lead times land after the fit-out finishes |
| 12--8 | First fix: containment, cable pulls, back boxes, comms room power | Contractor's first fix window | able chased into finished walls at your cost |
| 8--6 | Payment terminals ordered; merchant onboarding started | Merchant ID, acquirer due diligence | Terminals on site with no live merchant account |
| 6--4 | Second fix: rack, switches, access points, terminations and testing | Power on, room clean and dry | Trained staff arrive to boxes, not a network |
| 4--3 | PMS/EPOS build, menu configuration, interface testing | Menus signed off by operations | Pricing errors and failed postings during service |
| 3--2 | Network build tested end to end; Wi-Fi validated; devices enrolled | Circuit live | Wi-Fi rebuilt while the venue is trading |
| 2--1 | Staff training, friends and family, soft launch as load test | All systems live | The first genuine load test is paying guests |
| 1--0 | Snagging, day-one support plan, on-site cover confirmed | Snag list closed | Opening-week faults with no named owner |
| +1 to +4 | Handover to business as usual: as-builts, asset register, SLA start | Documentation complete | The service desk inherits an undocumented site |
Procurement lead times nobody budgets for
Three lead times catch operators repeatedly. Network hardware and EPOS terminals can carry long supply windows depending on model and vendor. Payment terminals depend on merchant onboarding, a compliance process with its own timetable and no interest in your opening date. PMS and EPOS build slots are booked in vendor calendars weeks ahead.
Menu configuration is the quietly enormous one. Someone has to build every dish, modifier, tax rate, course, printer route and discount rule, then test it. If the menu is not signed off three weeks out, that work happens the night before opening, and the [[integration points between PMS and EPOS]{.underline}](about:blank) are exactly where untested configuration breaks.
The soft launch is a load test, not a rehearsal dinner
Friends and family is the only chance to put real load on the systems before revenue depends on them. Run every card type through the terminals, including refunds and tips. Push the Wi-Fi with a full room of devices. Fire a full service through the kitchen printers and screens at once. Then fix every fault before the doors open properly.
Pre-opening is also when the support relationship starts. Day one wants an engineer on site, not a phone number. MicroNet Global's [[IT project management and delivery]{.underline}](about:blank) teams have run this pattern on openings including [[Ned's Club Washington DC]{.underline}](about:blank) and [[Swingers Las Vegas]{.underline}](about:blank), staying close through the first trading weeks rather than handing over at practical completion.
The handover that gets missed
Openings end untidily. The project team drifts away, the general manager is firefighting, and nobody formally transfers the site into support. Months later a switch fails and the service desk has no rack diagram, no asset register and no idea which VLAN the payment terminals sit on.
A proper handover is a short, boring document set: as-built cabling records, rack and port schedules, IP addressing, device inventory with serials and warranty dates, vendor references, admin credentials in the password vault, and a written start date for the support agreement. Agree it as a project deliverable with a sign-off, or it will not happen. Operators opening several [[restaurant and bar sites]{.underline}](about:blank) a year should make that pack a standard template, so site twelve looks like site one.
Frequently asked questions
Order it as soon as the lease is signed, ideally 24 weeks before opening. A business leased line can require a survey, a landlord wayleave and possible civils works, and any of those can add months. Order the primary circuit and a backup path at the same time, so a delayed install does not become a day-one trading problem.
Written by the MicroNet Global team. If you are working through any of this for your own estate, the specialists here are happy to talk it through.