Pinch a Penny, Save a Million Dollars.  Altametrics featured in OC Metro Magazine.

Altametrics has helped cut huge business expenses by making tiny adjustments.

Read the entire OC Metro article with photographs here.

Profile

How much lettuce do you waste if you quarter it the wrong way? The Wendy’s nationwide restaurant chain discovered that those improper cuts were costing it about $9.5 million a year.
   
How did it gain such insight? By hiring a couple of fellows now based in Los Alamitos who started their own restaurant software company, Altametrics, 10 years go. The company now has offices in Canada and New Delhi.
   
“I can tell you if a slice of cheese is missing from a restaurant at the end of a day,” says Mitesh Gala, 38, the CEO and majority owner of Altametrics. 
   
Gala’s parents owned a Jack in the Box franchise and grew it into a chain of 12. At age 14, Gala graduated from the chain’s management university. By the time he graduated from USC, he was running all 12 restaurants for this parents.
   
Gala began experimenting with a cost-savings software that he created, which saved him more than $50,000 on the annual cost of making french fries. He then hired a programmer, Ajay Shiv, to help him expand the program. They started Altametrics and created a software package, eRestaurant Services.
   
Business faltered until they landed Taco Time, a large restaurant chain.
   
“It was just a $30,000 deal, but it kept us afloat,” Gala says. “We stayed in business long enough for Wendy’s to hear about us.”
   
Gala and Shiv help companies identify their key cost problems. Much of the waste comes from not providing equal proportions in a scoop, for example. Plus, inventories that companies conducted twice a year are now done weekly.
      
“The manual way of doing business can be accurate, but it’s just too cumbersome,” says Gala.
       
He laughs, since his father thought he was crazy for starting on his own: “Now he’s our biggest cheerleader.”


Business: Altametrics
Location: Los Alamitos
Number of employees: 175
Start-up cost: The money spent for a classified ad
Light-bulb moment: “My partner and I had agreed before talking to Wendy’s that we would give them a figure of $100,000. Here we were, with nothing but an idea, but we’re telling this major chain we want $100,000. That was a Thursday. We had our  check on Monday morning.”