Mirus Reporter

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.

Theft Happens

We all know that theft happens in the restaurant industry; heck, it happens in most industries. For example, did you know; according to a study by the National Retail Federation, 2016 was the first year ever that 100% of retailers said they were victims of organized retail theft.

Unfortunately there are numerous stats to back up the prevalence of restaurant theft:

The Foundation

For the purpose of this article, let's make the assumption that the multiple restaurants you oversee have, in some form or another, a POS system, an established holiday calendar, weather data, customer satisfaction surveys, kitchen timers, and a labor management system.

If you only have a few of these systems in place, that's okay. I just wanted to name the data source systems that could be leveraged for this reporting overview.

It seems like an eternal question for many restaurant companies; should I dump the POS we use today in favor of a 'better' one? In our business, the POS is a fundamental system. Without a POS it is vitually impossible to run a multi-unit company. From out vantange point, it is also one of the most disliked systems. The churn in POS is not well documented but I think it is easy to say over 50% of companies choose a different vendor when their current POS reaches end of life. Shooting the POS vendor seems to be a popular sport among restaurant companies.

A look back on 2016

Listening and Improving

I asked Dina Misener, Manager of Application Development at Mirus to share her thoughts on what Mirus has accomplished in development during the 2016 year. Here's what she had to say:

"When asked to summarize what the Mirus development team accomplished over the past year, I paused and smiled. In my 15 years as a Mirus development team member, it gives me enormous pleasure to recognize we have had one of the most accomplished years in our history. Mirus underwent a major architectural and visual overhaul. The highlight of the year included the delivery of our new Smart Dashboard and Report View. Both of which were no small task and all teams, not just development participated in making our launches in March and September, a successful one."