Mirus Reporter

In a prior blog post, How to use PMIX Analysis, I wrote about Restaurant Product Mix in various stages of reporting complexity from Basic to Advanced Reporting and how each view can provide different insights. Today’s blog is going to capitalize on that prior issue but also take a different view in an effort to expand on the uses for PMIX.

At Mirus we're all about giving our clients control over their data. That includes how their restaurant data looks in the custom reports and dashboards they create.  We're excited to announce our newest reporting  enhancement: Total Line Font Control. See why total line font control is important and the new features available. 

Church's Chicken is one of the largest quick service chicken concepts in the world. They specialize in serving up freshly prepared, home-style fare, to help people provide affordable, complete meals for their families.  With more than 1700 locations, Church's is one of our largest clients by store count.

They are also one of our oldest clients. We've been helping them manage their data since 2007, including sales from multiple Point of Sale systems, menu item cost, speed of service, labor budgets, P&L and weather. 

I had the chance to sit down (pre-Covid) with Church's Senior Manager of Marketing Analytics, Jerrold Eaton,  to talk about how Mirus helps them organize and analyze their restaurant data.

In an era when terms like Data Scientist, and Analyst are commonly used in mass media, it is important to understand that interpreting data can be complicated.  It is easy to draw the wrong conclusion. I touched on this point in my material for Restaurant Finance Week last November. You should take caution when measuring your restaurant performance during this Covid period. Read on to see why what you see may not be what's happening and how a poor analysis can lead you to the wrong conclusion.

We have been sharing a story this year on the progression of Covid-19 and its impact on the restaurant industry. After months of steady improvement, there are signs that the situation is getting worse for the industry. The speed of the decline also seems to be increasing, at least in some segments.

The news and social media are filled with stories about dramatic new technologies like Augmented Reality (AR), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and how these technologies are going to revolutionize every day life. Business Intelligence (BI) is part of those story lines, and the term suffers the same misconceptions and misunderstandings as AR or AI. These terms are broad categories of software, services, skills, and systems, but are not specific products or solutions. These terms are useful for discussing concepts and potential uses, but are not very useful to companies trying to apply them.

With changes taking effect across the restaurant industry in response to COVID 19 (full business shutdowns or limited operations), I'd argue that if you pivoted and changed direction and now offer online ordering, delivery and curbside pickup, then understandings around operational execution, while always very important, are even more critical.  Visibility into and clarity around that execution is necessary to your long-term success.

And that visibility comes from your ability to transform your data into actionable information which, in turn, delivers clarity for you and your team.

Everyone has likely heard about the dramatic impact the Covid pandemic has had on restaurant sales. In March, it was common for restaurants to have lost 70% or more of their sales from 2019. Since then, we have all been monitoring the progress of sales returning to restaurants. One tool for monitoring the restaurant industry is the Mirus Index which allows us to examine trends daily across thousands of restaurants. Index tracks both sales and traffic patterns for each location, and the trends for both of these metrics leads you to some interesting questions. Have you been tracking both your sales as well as your traffic? Do you see any differences in each metric's trendline?

At Mirus we empower our restaurant clients by giving them the ability to easily consolidate and analyze their data. Our development team is continually making enhancements to the features and functions of the Mirus platform to give our clients more control and increase the ease of use.  We're happy to announce new enhancements we are rolling out with our latest update involving the font control, report option UI & alert features.  Learn what new functionality is on the way.