Mirus Reporter

In the Beginning

All restaurants, big or small, depend on a Point of Sale (POS) system to keep track of their business financials. A POS system can generate reports based on sales and customer information and trends that allow the restaurant operators to examine sales data along different thresholds and create promotions based on popular items or slower day parts. POS systems provide useful information to executives as their restaurant business develops.

Has Data Become More Valuable Than Oil?

Read an article on this very subject. Think about it, every day you can find something in the news about businesses using data to make more money. With that in mind, I wondered if Mirus clients were ahead of the curve? If they are, could their actions of leveraging data be paying for itself?

What's CX?

According to Wikipedia, Customer Experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction is made up of three parts:

1. The customer's journey.
2. The brand touchpoints the customer interacts with.
3. The environments the customer experiences (including digital environment) during their experience.

In addition to the focus on hiring and retaining staff, labor and food costs, customer engagement technology and winning the guest / customer through exceptional service are among the top priorities for restaurant companies that want to win the wallet and mind of the customer.

Change Happens...

Menu changes occur all the time in restaurants. Sometimes it is a price change; sometimes it is a limited time offer. There are lots of reasons for changing your menu. Think of a menu change as an avenue to stimulating your customers. By making the change, you are hoping to achieve a particular outcome; for example, selling more of a menu item or making more money selling the menu items you already sell.

During the last administration, many changes came about that greatly impacted the restaurant industry. The Affordable Care Act and overtime rules are two that stand out and while the minimum wage increase was not a federal decision, these are all issues that had analysts buzzing with predictions and restaurateurs debating how to adapt their businesses to these modifications.

With the election of a new administration, it’s no secret that restaurant executives (and the country, in general) continue to be divided with interpretations, forecasts, fear or excitement of the future and the direction in which we’re headed. While it’s too soon to see any major changes due to the new administration (as shifts in trends and legislature take time to manifest) some top issues impacting our industry, continue to be pondered. Many restaurant executives are keeping a watchful eye while preparing for the unforeseeable future.

What's The Word?!

What on earth is Big Data, a Data Lake and several other mind boggling tech terms you’ll want to be familiar with…

Spreadsheets are giving way to technology designed to deal with the mountains of (Giga, Tera and Peta Bytes) data companies are generating / accessing to gain deeper insights into their businesses and needed to remain competitive.

Whether you’re a seasoned IT professional or just now beginning to consider more advanced reporting tools you’ll want to become familiar with the lingo of the day. I say of the day primarily because new words / phrases are being added at a record pace – just look at Merriam Webster, heck, they added over 1000 new words in 2016 alone. The tech space is no different – did you know, not that long ago, that the definition of Computer was; ‘person who does computations’.

Measuring success or failure of a system that improves decision making is challenging in many respects. But, the Same Store Sales (SSS) metric can be useful, especially when applied to a long period of time, and across thousands of restaurants. SSS is caluclated as a percentage change from last year to this year, and only uses locations that are open for both years.

More than two ways to skin a cat...

In a previous post, I touched on the impact human behavior has on the deployment of a restaurant back office system. Many times the most difficult part of deploying a back office system is to get the managers to change their day to day behavior to fit the new system. If everyone doesn't use the system properly, it becomes garbage in - garbage out.

So, why would we want to start such a challenging project? Two motivations to deploy a back office system are improving process controls and automating repetitive tasks. In this post, I'd like to describe some alternatives to traditional back office systems. There are layers to this onion, and you do not need to view it as an "all or nothing" game.

Data Integration

Data integration is best described as a process in which heterogeneous data (marketing, sales, operations, customer, mystery shop, cleanliness, finance, etc.) often referred to as information silos, is extracted, transformed and combined in a data warehouse where it's accessible through a presentation layer that allows it to be used together to form more meaningful and actionable reports.

As a restaurant CMO the areas of social media, guest feedback and planning the next profitable promotion probably take up most of your time. But what about labor? Wait, Operations is supposed to take care of labor scheduling and staffing not marketing. Before you pass this very important function off to the next guy you may want to see how labor affects the marketing department's efforts.