Sprinkles Cupcakes opened the world's first cupcake bakery in Beverly Hills in 2005. They drew long lines of loyal cupcake fans and celebrity endorsements. Since then the company has grown to 31 locations from coast-to-coast.
Always innovating, they debuted the world's first Cupcake ATM in 2012 adding a new revenue center. They've also expanded into ice cream, cookies, and layer cakes.
Sprinkles Cupcakes are baked fresh in small batches throughout the day with the finest ingredients and contain no preservatives, trans fats, or artificial flavors. With over 50 cupcake flavors, the company is always finding new ways to surprise and delight their customers.
I had the chance to sit down on two different occasions (pre-Covid & post-Covid) with Sprinkles Cupcakes' Vice President of Technology, Daniel Legh-Page to talk about how Mirus helps them integrate different systems and quickly run reports. He's no stranger to Mirus as this is his 4th company using and rolling out Mirus.
Sprinkles is unique. We have 3 different point of sale systems that we needed to integrate. Mirus was a solution that I immediately thought of because we weren’t aggregating all of our sales channels into one reporting tool. The ease of aggregating all those together was something that we were missing.
I’ve been through integrations before with Mirus. It felt like a good fit from a reporting, BI, and consolidating all our data together standpoint.
We have cupcake ATM machines, those are fairly unique to Sprinkles. Those are treated as a separate point of sale system. They are a custom built, custom software application.
We also have a custom on-line ordering system that was built in-house. These systems weren’t really built as true point of sale systems. We’re seeing the differences in an out of the box point of sale system and a homegrown one.
As we were integrating with Mirus, we were seeing pieces of data that really needed to be tied up and cleaned up. Part of the project ended up being cleaning up some of these systems and how they were reporting. Which was great. We wouldn’t have really found a lot of these nuances without getting all that data in Mirus and looking at it from an above store level.
We integrated our labor system which is a separate system from our point of sale. We’re looking at guest survey data, inventory & GL data from our back office systems.
We’ve got a roadmap coming so we started with the basics, sales and labor data and now we’re starting to expand.
The biggest thing is really just giving more pieces of data to our operators and to our above store level folks to give them some actionable data that they can immediately use at their disposal that they haven’t really had. Especially at the bakery or the restaurant level.
That data is something that they’ve never been able to see, so having that at their disposal now on a flash report and different metrics outside of even sales or POS, you know guest type data or scorecard based data is something that we can be more proactive with at the restaurant level.
Run a Product Mix (PMIX) across all our channels is probably the biggest thing. The first thing I did when I started at Sprinkles I asked, "What are we selling, what does our PMIX look like?" And the answer was, "Well we have the Micros PMIX but we don’t have the ATM PMIX."
Now we’ve got all that. A red velvet cupcake is now a red velvet cupcake whether we sell it on an ATM, online, or walk-in. Now we get to see that full list of what’s selling and where and what times of day.
Prepare for things like limited time offers is a good example. We run a special cupcake for two weeks. Now we have that history of similar type items that we’ve run in the past and how they sold in different channels. If they sold well on the ATM, if they sold well online. Even times of day that they sold.
We’ve got that kind of history now to look back on so that we can prepare for how many ingredients and things to purchase for a limited time offer.
So typically, your financial platform would be your system of record. What we found is, the way we’ve integrated and the amount of integrations that we have for all these various systems that we have that accrue sales, is Mirus is the data we trust. We spend a lot of time with the historical data in Mirus and with the on-going import of data into Mirus. So we’re actually using it as our system of record because we have a good way to validate the data and make sure all our data gets pulled.
It’s probably all the time we spent getting it all into Mirus. With our financial tools and some of our other tools we had to migrate that data same into those tools. Mirus was a lot smoother process and since we went back and placed historical data into Mirus as well that allowed us to look and validate and resync some of legacy platforms and how that data was aligned. We really took 12-18 months to just kind of scrub through everything to make sure it was correct. Once we got to that finish line point we knew the data was good going forward because we did all that leg work up front with all those channels.
We’re a bakery so our bakers that come in at 2:00 am or 4:00 am to start baking for the day need something to reference as to how many cupcakes of each flavor they need bake. We’re taking various pieces of Mirus data, historically as well as future data that we’ve loaded into Mirus, say a pre-order tomorrow for 200 Vegan cupcakes, we take that future data, we take the historical data, last 3 weeks PMIX percentages and we compile all of that to come up with a gauge of this baker needs to bake X amount of red velvet cupcakes today. So that baker gets that sheet that is fed from Mirus data and is able to bake the amount of each flavor for the day.
On the data side not much, we’ve introduced new channels, kiosks, our web-ordering went through the roof. From the data that we’re looking at now we’re really focused a lot on the revenue center, what channel our guests are coming through. That’s really what shifted through Covid.
We saw an influx of web sales because we didn’t have walk-in anymore. And when bakeries started opening up again we saw an influx of walk-in coming back and we had kiosks at that point. So now we’re trying to see from a digital perspective where are all those orders coming, what’s our check averages on each of those channels because they differ. We’re really trying to gauge where our customers are going and how those are changing now that things are opening back up. Digital is our continued focus. We’re really looking at that channel data, that revenue center data to manage it and monitor it.
It was great. The biggest thing was being able to interact with other customers here. Seeing neat reports that other concepts were running and other integrations that other restaurant groups were using. So we’ve really expanded our list even further of what we can possibly do.
It’s good to talk to the Mirus team in person and make sure our roadmap is aligned and give our opinion on how we think new things need to be implemented. The biggest takeaway is talking to our peers and seeing what they are doing and getting nuggets of information.
Mirus provides services in data management and solutions in custom reporting for the restaurant industry.
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