Data Visualization Real-Time Reporting Meaningful Insights

In looking at a host of products, it was simply the best performer in restaurant accounting. The speed at which they handle the enterprise level business intelligence needs of five guys, everyone here was just blown away.

We’ve never seen a restaurant accounting software handle so many locations, so many reports, so fast. For us, it’s like a utility knife right? My finance teams can use it, my purchasing teams can use it, my workforce management teams can use it, my ops teams can use it, my training teams can use it. We’re also putting in some data around our secret shopper program and customer service as well. So, for us, we are able to put all restaurant accounting from all aspects of our business into our restaurant software and find corollaries where we didn’t know they existed before. There’s no part of our business that does not use the restaurant software both domestically and globally. Being able to handle exchange rates, especially being able to customize the restaurant software to fit your needs. Meaning in the US I can choose to see all sales across all products across all countries in US dollars. But the Netherlands team can opt to see it in Euros right? My Hong Kong team can opt to see all their business intelligence reporting in US dollars and that reporting is done on the fly to make it very valuable for the team in that market.

I’ve never seen a restaurant accounting software be so flexible and we’re just thrilled for how it works for us. So Altametrics workforce management software and delivery, it’s been critical for us being able to absorb and understand how deliveries impacted our business. Delivery has been a big disruptor in the food service industry in the US as a whole. We’re trailing the rest of the world because this happened globally many years ago, but being able to see, to download the details at the store level, area level, regional level and then being able to break it out by vendor. It allows us to be very very nimble in the decisions we make and how we run the business.

We can train most folks to use the restaurant software within about two to three minutes and from there they just run with it right? There’s not a very steep learning curve so by playing it across the enterprise was very very easy for us. So we were very pleasantly surprised at how fast folks picked up and gained value from the tool across the organization.

As we grow we keep finding new things that we didn’t know that it could do for us right? We’re looking at other restaurant software or other tools to sort of supplement it. They said no, it can do it. Here’s a business intelligence report, let me show you, right? So we’re always happy with some of the new things popping up in the restaurant software and it’s just become critical for everything that we do.

I’ve actually been in board meetings and some will bring up, well I wonder what you do if you know some factor or some question regarding sales or product mix. I can simply pull out my phone and pull the business intelligence up right there in the meeting and I’ll get hey were did you get that from and how did you get that so quickly. Yeah, it makes me look good. We’re actually not yet using all that the restaurant software can do, but that’s more on us than Altametrics. It’s just a fantastic restaurant software for business intelligence, I’ve got nothing bad to say about it.

I’m Michael Shasavari and I started in the business of quick service restaurant back in the 70s with two of my partners. Initially we found a company called B50 out in Minnesota that didn’t have any restaurant business intelligence reporting. We used them. It was better than using our own people. It was a little bit more efficient, but unfortunately the data was all static. The only format they produced was PDF. So we could see the data, but we couldn’t copy it, couldn’t paste it. We couldn’t do any graphs, stack it or arrange it. Nothing.

Then Altametrics business intelligence came along. The second point was we could choose was what data we wanted to see depending on what was the emphasis was in my business. I’ll give you a very good example. The product mix, if you think about doing this in a spreadsheet, the typing of 78 products and the number sold on a day by day basis for 90 stores and I’m trying to put this together. It would take somebody here a week to get through that task. I can go to a product mix section, click and I have it.

The truth of the matter about the business intelligence reporting and my expectations is this, it far exceeded my expectations. I’ve gotta be truthful about it, there were parts of it that were native there that I really haven’t thought about looking at before. Let me just say this, I know from personal experience that since we started using Altametrics business intelligence versus prior, our combined food cost and labor cost has been decreased by at least 1 to 1.5% of revenue.

We were an organization with 90 stores. Almost 40 stores right now have sales in excess of 50 million dollars. You can figure out how much 1.5% is of that. It’s a huge amount. Well the ROI on using Altametrics business intelligence, I would say it is probably such a high number that it would be almost ridiculous to mention.

The cost of Altametrics business intelligence versus the benefit is truly immeasurable. The people who run our restaurants, the area coaches, get up in the morning while they’re turning on their PC and logging onto Altametrics business intelligence. The picture they get is the picture of what happened in their restaurants, their 5 or 6 restaurants in the area yesterday. They can get this as early as they want, as early as they wake up. That almost tells them where to go that day, which restaurant needs their attention. Compared this to the guy that doesn’t have this, who has a set plan that they’ll go to this restaurant one day then this restaurant the next day, that’s not a way to run the business. You want to go to where you’re needed.

What Altametrics business intelligence is doing for my operators is telling them where they need to put most of their attention. So to me, that is a tool that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Everyone should use it.

I am the president of Gi Gi’s cupcakes and we started franchising Gigi’s about five years ago in 2007. Actually 2008 was when the first store opened and then we started franchising shortly thereafter. We have about 82 stores now and about another 15 to 20 that we’re building this year and hope to have about 110 by the end of the year.

I found out about Altametrics Business Intelligence from my accountant who had suggested that we use their services so that we could consolidate different numbers from all our stores and I actually had also heard about Altametrics Business Intelligence through a partner whose company had used it in the restaurant business. We have a POS system that provided some information to us, but there was a lot more information that we wanted. We were also starting online ordering.

Absolutely the most beneficial tool that Altametrics Business Intelligence brought to us was being able to extract information from our online ordering. Our current POS solution wasn’t able to do that. As a franchise company, we need to know what all the sales are in our stores so Altametrics Business Intelligence was able to develop a system that could get that information for us. ABI helped us grow in that we had a lot more information and we were more strategic and we’re able to plan better. I would highly recommend ABI for several reasons. For one, it’s a good value on a per store cost. It’s relatively inexpensive. Secondly, ABI has been great to work with. They have been very responsive to the issues that we had. Overall, they’ve just provided us with the information that we really needed to continue to grow in business.