Mirus Restaurant Solutions
Blog Demo Login

Fast Casual Operations: 2 Areas That Affect Restaurant Profits

Posted by Mirus Marketing

FastCasualProfits.jpg

The ordering experience at a fast-casual restaurant can be overwhelming for some guests. Take a second and imagine this scenario with me: You walk into a fast-casual restaurant with a friend. Let's say this is one of those new pizza concepts where you go through the line picking toppings, making your pizza similar to a Subway line.

It's lunchtime, the place is fairly busy. You have a handful of customers behind you as you stare at the menu board above. But it's ok, they are also staring, trying to decide how they should begin their journey. For some, the ordering experience can even cause anxiety. To make the process go smoothly and put guests at ease there are two things fast-casual operators can do. Focusing on these two areas will help fast casual operations increase profits.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Operations, Performance

What Comes First: Smart Data or Smart People?

Posted by Dave

What Comes First?

Determining the reason why two restaurant reporting numbers are different can be a real challenge, like the chicken or the egg. In this era of big data, many restaurant companies are racing to improve their use and comprehension of the data they have locked up in their system silos. But, the question for this post is: Does data make people smarter or is it the other way around?

In 2017, same-store sales of all restaurants fell by -1.1% according to TD2NK and their Black Box Intelligence index. This index is computed on data from 30,000 restaurants, so it is a pretty good aggregation of data - about 5% of the restaurant industry. In this population, I think it is fair to say that some of the companies use their data aggressively and some do not.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Performance

3 Characteristics of An Enterprise Data Warehouse

Posted by Chuck

Overview

Before we jump into the characteristics of an Enterprise Data Warehouse (‘EDW’) it might help to define what an EDW consists of. An EDW is a centralized repository that integrates data from various transactional, legacy, or 3rd party systems and applications that are used to operate and manage your business. In contrast to these systems, the EDW is built for analysis and retrieval of data rather than the upkeep of individual transactional records.

Ralph Kimball, one of the original architects of data warehousing and someone whose teachings we adhere to, provided a more concise definition of a data warehouse: “A data warehouse is a copy of transaction data specifically structured for query and analysis.”.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant IT

The Do's And Don'ts of Increasing Restaurant Profit Margin

Posted by Mirus

Finding new ways to maximize the overall profitability of a restaurant business is on the mind of every restaurant owner. Whether you have a few restaurants or a few hundred, you’re constantly trying to think up ways to beef up the profit margin. Your executives analyze the numbers, think up ideas to control costs, cut down on food waste, offer Limited Time Offers, cut back labor hours and eliminate overtime, all with the ultimate goal of increasing profitability. But what steps are taken to ensure that any of these ideas will prove successful? Are they examining performance metrics in order to track and evaluate what steps are effective and which areas need improvement?

Read More

Mirus 2017 Year In Review

Posted by Leslie

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.

Read More

Topics: Mirus Updates

Restaurant CTO Challenge: How to Monitor Labor Data

Posted by Mirus

The CTO Challenge: Labor

One of the many challenges of the restaurant CTO is to implement a reporting solution that can help lower labor costs and maximize profits. They’re tasked with integrating the latest technology, seeking the right platforms for their structure, drive success and create a competitive lead. The days of Excel spreadsheets are numbered. Ultimately, the CTO needs to find and recommend a platform that will aid restaurant executives in making the best decisions in operations and finance and developing strategies that provide a significant ROI. The CTO’s research and definitive recommendation of the suitable reporting tool is vital and can affect the productivity (or lack thereof) of all departments.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Data Warehouse, Restaurant IT

Analyzing Restaurant Profits

Posted by Dave

Analyzing Restaurant Profits

Restaurants are changing the way they analyze profits and performance. New techniques for examining data are being used. New metrics are being calculated. And perhaps the most important change is the amount of data being examined every day, and throughout the day in some cases.

Historically, restaurants reported highly summarized data each day to manage the business. Sales for Lunch or Dinner, or sales mix for a day or week, or labor dollars as a percent of sales for the day are typical examples. Summarized data can mask operational issues, and it limits the depth of performance analysis you can conduct. For example, a daily labor metric could hide the fact that there were hours where too many employees were on the clock while at different times of the day staffing was insufficient to service customer demand.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Profit

5 Hassles Every Report Writer Goes Through

Posted by Dave

Why is it difficult to find and organize reporting data?

All you want is a factual answer to an important question you have about the business. It may take hours or days of labor to get all of the data put together properly. But you need to make a critical decision and you need the data to figure out the best course of action. To make matters worse, if you need to the data refreshed again in six weeks, it will take just as long to compile the data.

Read More

Topics: Performance

Spreadsheet & Trust, Oxymoron or Truth?

Posted by Chuck

According to Microsoft, there are 1.2B (that’s right, B for Billion) Office users today. Of that, roughly 750M use Excel. Wow! That’s a lot of number crunching going on.

Error-Prone 

But what’s even more interesting is that 9 out of 10 (88%) spreadsheets have errors on them – that warrants another Wow! That’s a lot of inaccurate information being used by companies. And depending on the data being reported it could have a significant impact on a company’s regulatory compliance, perceived health not to mention incorrect assumptions being made about strategy, marketing, etc.

Read More

Topics: Performance

Should Restaurant HR Leverage BI?

Posted by Chuck

Today, for many restaurant companies, the challenge of harnessing the myriad of disparate data generated by the systems (POS, BOH, ERP, etc.) used to operate and manage their businesses is just that, a challenge. And when it comes to the Human Resource (HR) department, well, they're no different - the reason being, data associated with different tasks such as hiring, job satisfaction surveys, training details and performance management reviews all reside in different databases.

Read More

Topics: Restaurant Data Warehouse

Search

Subscribe to Blog

Recent Posts

Top Restaurant Blog
Hot Companies In Houston