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.

Tell me how you guys are using Mirus?

We’re doing a lot of trend reporting. We’re doing a lot of experimental reporting. Following an idea, getting results and then writing another report to take it to another level. For the first time in forever, we’re getting good information from our data and we’re getting surprising information that’s allowing us to react and to look at our plans a little bit differently and then do business.

Tell me about some of these surprises that you’ve found.

We’ll run a product mix report and we’ll find something that ranks much higher in the product mix than we expect it to. For example, a frappe popped up in our top ten sales for a particular day. Frappes are something we typically sell in the afternoon, which isn’t our busiest time. We’ll run more reports to show if we are selling these frappes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or is it particular stores that are selling them. What are the possible things that could have added to that particular item selling more for a time?

So how does being able to dig into the data help you manage your business?

We have real information to give our franchisees. We can tell them specifically with documentation behind it what the behavior of certain items is. When we were talking to them before it was almost like anecdotal, we’d say well we think the food is adding on to our business. But now we can say we look and there are customers that are coming in to the store and they’re just buying food, they’re not buying coffee at the same time so this is an additional sale, and we have a way of showing them that this is an additional sale, not just a coincidence.

How do you think having actual facts to back up what you’re telling your franchisees affects your relationship with your franchisees?

They take us a lot more seriously. It’s harder for them to refute what we’re saying and to think that we’re just fulfilling our own prophecies. It just gives us another level of credibility.

How are you using customer data in Mirus?

Micros is our point of sale system. LevelUp is our loyalty program. LevelUp is one of those payment options on your mobile phone, and you have to sign up for it so they’re keeping track of who those customers actually are, which in Micros we have no idea who the customers are, it’s just all anonymity. So they’re tracking those customers and we are importing the LevelUp information into Mirus and we can match up the LevelUp data with the Micros data so taking it a step beyond what LevelUp has we can actually tell you what this customer who comes in every day, what they buy by matching up those checks.

The other thing with LevelUp is with the loyalty program, those people are accruing credits, like a frequent flier program, and we didn’t have any visibility to what credits were being cashed in on what sales. It was just kinda out there someplace.

What about online ordering?

OLO is our online ordering application and people can go on to the website, pre-order their coffee, come into the store and it’s sitting there waiting for them. OLO is not integrated with Micros at all so those sales just plain aren’t visible when you’re looking at your total sales in Micros you’re not seeing those, they’re just not there. By importing that information into Mirus we can get a total picture of what our total sales are, all of the discounts.

So now we can marry all of that stuff together and get good totals and we can see better trends and just have a more complete picture of our business.

What are some unique things you measure in Mirus?

We’re using lots of dimensions for our store master files. So we’ll look at things like where the store is located, are they downtown, urban, suburban. One of the things that we’re collecting is, is that store on the AM side of traffic or PM side of traffic. It’s amazing what a difference that makes. If you’re on the AM side of the street you’re probably going to do a lot better than if you’re on the PM traffic side of the street. Things that we’ve never thought about before.

Anything else you want to add?

Mirus has just been a great decision for Dunn Brothers Coffee. When we implemented Mirus we really didn’t have the kind of hiccups you often have with a huge undertaking like that. Everyone at Mirus is just Awesome. We don’t have problems with performance, the Mirus server is never down. I wish I could say that about Micros. But this has just been a great experience for us and we are all just very pleased.