Mirus Reporter

If you haven't had an opportunity to join the Mirus User Conference, then you've been missing out! Besides enjoying time with industry peers, sipping on drinks, and bowling, we also discuss how restaurants can leverage their data.

Mirus is happy to report that our clients, as measured by the Mirus Index each day, are outperforming both the industry averages, and the government's numbers in the 3rd quarter.

2019 is a pretty good year, so far. But, according to Black Box Intelligence's latest report on sales and traffic, both were negative for July (-1% and -4%, respectively). Both were also negative, albeit marginally, in June (-0.01% and -3.1%, respectively).

Executives and managers in the restaurant industry are extremely busy. They have very little time to open multiple reports in various systems to see how they are doing. Dashboards let them know how things are going with a quick glance.

Learn the basics of setting up restaurant dashboards to improve your business. Also, be sure to download the 5 Keys to Setting Up Restaurant Dashboards guide to get the most out of your dashboards.

Client Spotlight: Dunn Brothers Coffee

Dunn Brothers Coffee stands out in a class of its own with great-tasting coffee that is carefully brewed from hand-selected, freshly roasted beans. The Minneapolis-based, award-winning coffee company has 80+ locations across the country, both company and franchisee owned.

As a Mirus client for over 4 years they've added a number of integrations into their data warehouse including: point of sale, food cost, inventory, guest loyalty, online ordering, and weather.

I had the chance to sit down with Dunn Brothers Reporting Systems Analyst, Deb Williams, to talk about how Mirus helps her consolidate and report trends in their data.

What's data integration and how is it leveraged?

Data integration is a process in which heterogeneous data (finance, marketing, operations, sales, customer, mystery shop, cleanliness, inventory, etc.) is organized and cleansed into a data warehouse. It is leveraged when it's accessible through a platform that allows it to be leveraged together to form meaningful and actionable reports.

What are some challenges restaurants face today?

Restaurant companies are drowning in data about their customers, operational execution, internal business processes, finances, suppliers, partners, and competitors. Many can't leverage this flood of data and convert it to actionable information for growing revenue, increasing profitability, and efficiently operating the business.

Why? Well, there are multiple reasons, here's two that come to mind:

In this post, I want to examine the differences between reporting and analysis. Why? Because they're fundamentally different. Yet, I never hear, "we're doing all the analysis we need." No, instead I'm hearing, "we have all the reporting we need." And I'm quite certain they do - what with all the systems used to run a restaurant. It's likely that they and you have hundreds of standardized reports available and many are likely helpful at telling you what happened; e.g., how many of this or that item did we sell, what's our percentage of labor, what's our gross / net sales in this or that store, market, overall, what's our cash over short, etc. See, all helpful until you want to understand why the cash is shorter than you'd like, why that item didn't sell as you expected, labor in a market is higher or why that promo did so well but we wound up making less money.

To get an answer to the 'WHY' something happened requires you to perform some analysis and that requires a solution that can help you knit together the pieces needed to get at the underlying answer. So let’s start with a high-level definition of Reporting and Analysis.

The competition in the restaurant industry is fierce. You need to make your brand stand out, apart from the rest. Bringing in consistent revenue is tougher than ever. Restaurant executives find themselves pondering a series of questions:

• What steps do we take to make sure we stay ahead of the competition?
• How do we assure the success of our marketing initiatives?
• What are some tactics that help improve sales in our restaurant business?
• Are our restaurants staffed properly for heavier and lighter traffic times?
• How can we keep employee turnover down?
• How can our employees help increase sales?

Client Spotlight: Alamo Drafthouse

Alamo Drafthouse has been named the coolest movie theater in the world. Their mission is to provide good food, good beer and good film all in the same place. They currently operate over 40 locations and have more scheduled to open.

As a Mirus client for over 6 years they've added a number of integrations into their data warehouse including : ticketing point of sale, food & beverage point of sale, scheduled labor, guest feedback and weather.

I had the chance to sit down with Alamo Drafthouse's Integrations Manager, Jake Lawson, to talk about how Mirus helps him manage data and reporting for both the movie and food & beverage sides of his company.

Data collection is important but the quality of data for a restaurant enterprise is key to ensuring that it is used in the most productive way. Inaccurate and outdated data can affect overall productivity. When multiple sources of data are getting pulled into one database, duplicate and/or erroneous information can be inevitable.

Data cleansing is the process of finding and correcting flawed information from your restaurant company’s database. The process is mainly used where incorrect, incomplete, or irrelevant details are identified and then modified, swapped or cleared out. Data cleansing is important because it improves the quality of your data and in doing so, increases productivity, while simultaneously doing away with potential expenses, and helping to improve ROI. Managing and ensuring that the data is clean can provide significant business value and making decisions without being able to weigh them against a strong, valid set of data can hurt a restaurant business.

Restaurant Labor Theft

According to the American Payroll Association (APA) almost 75% of U.S. businesses are paying employees for time not actually worked. The APA also indicated that loss, due to time theft, can run from 4% to 7% of Gross Payroll. Assuming the APA estimates for theft are accurate and your cost of labor is running around the industry average of 30% then it would be safe to further assume that a restaurant with $1,500,000 (‘$1.5M’) in sales could be losing $18K to $31K per location on an annualized basis.