Mirus Reporter

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. Each month we shine the light on our clients, their accomplishments and what they're doing to increase their restaurant profit margin.

Mike Scafidi, Loss Prevention Manager, Uno Pizzeria & Grill

Since 1943 Uno Pizzeria & Grill has grown to over 140 locations in 24 states and 6 countries. People are still lining up to get a taste of the famous Deep Dish Pizza. Each restaurant makes their deep dish pizza dough fresh every morning.

When Uno first started working with Mirus they knew some things just weren't adding up. They've been one of our poster children for generating a huge ROI (over 200%) with Mirus. One example is how by using Mirus they figured out their POS was not programmed to charge for more than 3 toppings.Pizzas that had 8 toppings were being priced the same as 3 topping pizzas. That adds up to a lot of money not being collected.

At our most recent user conference, I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with Mike about how Mirus has helped Uno drop basis points and add more money to the bottom line.

Leslie:  How are you using Mirus at Uno?

Mike:  We’re using it in a whole bunch of ways. We’re using it for sales analysis, loss prevention, marketing purposes.   We run the full gamut in terms of what we use it for.

Leslie:  What were you using before Mirus?

Mike:  We really didn’t have anything that we were using.  We were just pulling things together and dumping it in a spreadsheet and trying to analyze it that way.

Leslie:  Why did you guys choose Mirus?

Mike:  It was a program that best fit us.  We found that pricing-wise it worked out great for us.  The ability to work with us was very good. Working with your account management team has been great.  They are very responsive.  I think having a dedicated person to work with our account is always a great thing. Our account coordinator works very closely with us and is very responsive with trying to help us out with any issues or any questions we have, or to maybe look at something in a different way we hadn’t really thought of looking at it before.

Leslie:  How has Mirus impacted your business?

Mike:  It’s given us insight into the details.  We went from Macro to Micro and that’s huge.  We’re able to tell you the details of why something is good or bad versus just saying this category is doing good and this category is doing bad.

Leslie:  How has Mirus added value to your company?

Mike:  It’s been a huge add value.  Over the last four years or so we’ve dropped 60 basis points in our discounting. But the predominate amount of that really has come over the last year.  In that we’ve dropped 40 basis points over the last year.

Leslie:  How?

Mike:  A lot of that is taking Mirus and using it as a tool to make change. For example, our discounting with comps. We had seven different buckets that comps got dumped into.   Nobody ever really defined what those buckets were and what they were supposed to be used for. Using Mirus we went back and defined what the buckets were and then eliminated buckets.  That elimination of buckets actually dropped our percentage in that category over the last year 20 basis points.  60 basis points off of sales is huge and 40 basis points over the last two years has been huge.  It’s been between comps and employee discounts that we’ve seen that drop.  We used Mirus data to affect policy change and employee discounts which had us drop 20 basis points in a category that we’ve been running fairly steady over the last several years. 

Leslie: Which Mirus solutions are you using?

Mike:  Right now we’re using Enterprise and we’re starting to get our feet wet with Sentinel and it’s starting to pay early returns.  Once we get up and running on it completely I look forward to some really interesting results.

Leslie:  What is the difference in detecting fraud through Enterprise versus Sentinel?

Mike:  What Sentinel does is it identifies specifics where as Enterprise you’ve got to kind of really dig to understand what the data look like.  Sentinel really just clearly identifies where your potential issue is and allows you to go right to that rather than having to sift through the data in Enterprise.

Leslie:  What makes Mirus different?

Mike:  The willingness to work with you on a one on one basis to give you exactly what it is you’re looking for.  Mirus looks to customize to what your needs really are.  You don’t find that with a lot of other exception type reporting companies.  I don’t think there is a willingness to get down to that detail.