Mirus Reporter

Mirus Restaurant Solutions is a leading provider of business intelligence and data warehouse services for the restaurant industry. The past 18 years have provided us with an enormous amount of educational experiences that have allowed us to fine tune and become the innovative company we are today. But just where did we come from and how has that shaped us? Let’s take a trip through time to see how Mirus began, what we’ve learned and how it’s made us who we are today.

The Beginning

It all started as a typical 1998 tech startup in Tampa, Florida. A small group of innovators lead by Brad Anderson formed The Sankaty Group. Like most offerings in the marketplace today, the product was developed as a solution to a problem. Anderson was working for one of his professors who had a consulting business. He was tasked with crunching a lot of numbers to help clients with menu engineering decisions. Using spreadsheets to get the job done proved to be extremely cumbersome. There had to be a better way.

So Anderson began to develop his own data warehouse product to make the task easier. When they weren’t playing softball, drinking beer or watching football the group was writing the initial code for what would become Mirus’ flagship product: Mirus Enterprise. The group was a unique blend of people from both the restaurant and technology communities with diverse backgrounds. In 2001 the Sankaty Group was acquired by Mirus.

Our clients love us, and we love them right back! We're constantly amazed by their ingenuity and accomplishments. Their ideas and requests are what keep us on the leading edge of restaurant business solutions. Periodically we like to shine the light on our clients, their accomplishments and what they're doing to increase their restaurant profit margin.

Good Smoke Restaurant Group is a barbecue-focused restaurant company which owns and operates two well-known regional brands: Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q and Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. They currently operate over 50 restaurants and are poised for growth.

As a Mirus client for over 4 years they've added a number of integrations into their data warehouse including : food cost, inventory, scheduled labor, budgets, speed of service and on-line ordering.

I had the chance to sit down with Good Smoke's Reporting Analyst, Andy Short, to talk about how Mirus helps him manage all the data and reporting for two brands.

Our clients love us, and we love them right back! We're constantly amazed by their ingenuity and accomplishments. Their ideas and requests are what keep us on the leading edge of restaurant business solutions. Periodically we like to shine the light on our clients, their accomplishments and what they're doing to increase their restaurant profit margin.

Benihana is an operator of teppanyaki-style restaurants. Their 98 locations include three other concepts: RA Sushi, HARU Sushi, and Samurai.

Benihana uses several restaurant systems. When they came to Mirus they were looking for a way to piece all that information together. Executives were stuck waiting on reports while two laptops ran overnight to generate reports, with some reports taking 4 hours to run. They faced computer processing limitations, manual input errors, and financial analysts spending more time reconciling, mapping and processing data instead of actually analyzing the data.

They had tried other non-restaurant systems which were complicated and lacked user support. Mirus checked all the boxes and provided them with a one-stop shop for data analytics with easy to use tools, real-time data and fast report delivery.

I recently had the chance to sit down with Benihana's Alex Gonzalez, Director of Financial Planning & Analysis, and Meredith Meisler, Financial Analyst, to learn how Mirus helped them break the bottleneck in their reporting.

Our clients love us, and we love them right back! We're constantly amazed by their ingenuity and accomplishments. Their ideas and requests are what keep us on the leading edge of restaurant business solutions. Periodically we like to shine the light on our clients, their accomplishments and what they're doing to increase their restaurant profit margin.

PR Management Corp is a 63 unit Panera franchisee which operates locations in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine. They've been a Mirus client now for over 6 years.

I recently had the chance to sit down with PR Management Corp's IT Director, Charlie Hecht, and although he loves Excel, he admits Mirus is better than Excel when it comes to restaurant reporting.

Our clients love us and we love them right back! We're constantly amazed by their ingenuity and accomplishments. Their ideas and requests are what keep us on the leading edge of restaurant business solutions. Periodically we like to shine the light on our clients, their accomplishments and what they're doing to increase their restaurant profit margin.

2017, what a year it was for the restaurant industry. We saw our share of ups and downs having fought through hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. The stock market hit record highs with increased valuations of some restaurant stocks. There were many major acquisitions throughout the industry.

Mirus also had a busy year. This 2017 Year in Review details some of the highlights from the year.

Our clients love us and we love them right back! We're constantly amazed by their ingenuity and accomplishments. Their ideas and requests are what keep us on the leading edge of restaurant business solutions. Periodically we like to shine the light on our clients, their accomplishments and what they're doing to increase their restaurant profit margin.

How much does it cost? That’s the question that inevitably comes up whenever I’m talking with a restaurant executive about the data analytic services Mirus provides. Sometimes the timing of the question is right on; other times it’s a bit premature.

If I were selling pens or another commodity the price question wouldn’t be that big of a deal. A pen is a pen. You can touch it, you know what it does, how to use it and why you need it. Business Intelligence (BI) Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, while not new to the restaurant industry (we’ve been around for more than 17 years), are not so straightforward. The benefits and use cases of these solutions are different depending on who you talk to.

As a restaurant CMO the areas of social media, guest feedback and planning the next profitable promotion probably take up most of your time. But what about labor? Wait, Operations is supposed to take care of labor scheduling and staffing not marketing. Before you pass this very important function off to the next guy you may want to see how labor affects the marketing department's efforts.

Labor is on the minds of many restaurant executive's these days and for good reason. The news of the Department of Labor's new overtime rules along with minimum wage increases has operators scrambling to keep labor costs down. Technology can play a big role in helping track labor and prevent overtime.