Mirus Reporter

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What a great conference this year! I want to thank everyone who joined us, especially the presenters and panelists. This year we made it back to lively and always exciting Vegas strip. Check out our photos here.

Gone are the days of consumers ordering meals from menus delivered in the mail or left at their doorsteps. The frustration of dictating the order and repeating credit card information to a restaurant employee, struggling to hear over the background noise of a bustling restaurant is coming to an end. Once again, technological strides have brought us one step closer to making our lives easier. All we have to do is download the app, put in our location, and we're shown dozens (if not hundreds) of restaurants in our area that we can choose from. Whether placing an advanced order through an app and having the food waiting for you upon arrival or getting meal ideas for delivery by having access to a plethora of choices, the food ordering apps were intended to take us to the next level of convenience.

The Future, Now?

All restaurant businesses strive to improve and streamline operations and increase profits by cutting expenses and recovering resources. A common reaction to increased wages by some restaurant executives has been to replace human labor with machines. In the ever-changing climate of the restaurant industry, it makes sense that some restaurant companies would implement the use of machines to grow productivity and cut down on labor costs. But are robots equipped to give customers the same level of service as a friendly employee? Are automated machines destined to take over restaurants?

"POS, Meet BOH"

In today’s restaurant space, the business of owning and operating a restaurant is more challenging and competitive than ever before. This means it’s more important than ever to leverage technology to your advantage and no better place to start than using your Point-of-Sale system’s (POS) sales data combined with your Back of House (BOH) to help more tightly control your two biggest controllable expenses – food and labor costs.

Looking more closely, restaurant food & beverage purchases plus labor expenses account for 60 to as much as 68 cents of every dollar in restaurant sales. The combined total is referred to as; “Prime Cost”, and it's at this crossroads where the battle for restaurant profitability takes place. Why, because you have the ability to control these expenses. Unlike your fixed costs (lease, utilities, insurance, etc.), you can directly impact your food cost percentage by more effective purchasing, product handling and menu pricing and your labor with tools to help with allocation, scheduling and overtime reduction/prevention. More on the labor from an earlier series of Blogs.

Upgrading Your Insight

Restaurant company executives carefully select best in class systems to manage their restaurant operations. Each system (Point of Sale, Inventory, Food Cost, Labor Scheduling, Online Ordering, Customer Feedback, Payroll, GL) likely does an excellent job of collecting the necessary information. However, piecing together the data from all of these transactional systems, in order to gain greater insight, is often done manually and the process is not only time consuming but also often unreliable. Ever feel like you go through the effort of collecting, sorting and entering data into a spreadsheet, but then you’re not able to access the right information when you need it? Here is when executives begin to experience frustration because they aren't always able to get the necessary answers in a timely manner (if at all). Do you find your company in the same predicament? How long does it take to get a report? And will it tie in all your restaurant data? Are you frustrated by reporting limitations? If the answer is yes, it may be time to upgrade your current restaurant reporting methods.