Mirus Reporter

There are several costs that can drain profits but not many are as significant to bottom line or as difficult to control as labor. When costs begin to climb, anxiety levels rise and often lead to knee jerk reactions that might include reducing employee pay, and cutting the amount of workers or hours worked.While any of these may produce cost reductions, none are the right path to solving labor cost issues and may have a negative impact on the quality of service.

Another thought to consider is the changes that come with the Affordable Care Act, mandatory pay increases and proposed changes to the overtime rules to name a few. You can start to see why most restaurant operators list labor costs among their top concerns, it's no wonder many lose sleep over it.

The Elephant In The Room...

Theft, or loss, in the restaurant industry is everywhere. Lots of small, cash transactions are one factor that sets the stage for loss. Food that can be consumed at home is another. This is a touchy subject for restaurant companies, a reality that very few like to discuss.

Of all the discussions that are uncomfortable for restaurant companies, manager theft ranks near the top. At most companies, the manager is a key control point for finances. We empower them with unique access to money and data. One bad apple can do a lot of damage.

What is a KPI?

Before we delve into our KPI discussion, let's discuss what exactly is a KPI?

A Key Performance Indicator or "KPI" is a measurable business metric used to evaluate factors that are crucial to the success of an organization. A set threshold is used to gauge whether a KPI metric is performing better or worst than your threshold.

Employee Spotlight:

Matt Brock, UI Developer, Mirus Restaurant Solutions

At Mirus, we have an exceptional team of people that all strive to serve our clients in the best way possible. Our clients are our highest priority and we understand that without their ongoing support, we would not be able to continue in any worthwhile direction.

Introduction

A restaurant company has dozens of critically important, inter-connected processes. After all, restaurants are a combination of a factory and a retail operation rolled up into one. And, don't forget distribution. Delivery and catering are both growing revenue centers for many restaurant companies.

To keep track of all these processes without software solutions is a high-risk, low-reward option. A very smart team might be able to keep all the facts in their heads, but they would not be able to grow the business.  There aren't enough really smart people in the world to do all this work manually.

In this Blog post, we will examine the pros and cons of building an your own Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence (‘BI’) and analytic solution versus licensing one from a leading industry expert like Mirus Restaurant Solutions.

Executives running multi-unit restaurants use a number of different systems to keep track of the health of their business. Many times I've talked with restaurant executives that are looking for one system that handles it all. Unfortunately, that doesn't exist. Different systems are really good at different things.

Point of Sale systems are great at capturing transactional details, Back of House Systems are great at capturing things like inventory and Business Intelligence (BI) systems are great at pulling it all together so you can analyze the overall health of your restaurant company. But what information should you be pulling together and why is it important?

Asking the right questions, is just as important as finding the proper answers

In order to find the proper answers, I wanted to understand what's the difference between product mix and market basket analysis? What are the advantages and disadvantages to those reporting methods? Is it more appropriate to use one method over the other? I sat down with a few Mirus employees to understand a little more about the two different analytical techniques.

The wave of the future?

Within every industry, technology enables us to make positive changes to increase growth and productivity - Upping the ROI is certainly a great reason for making those changes. The restaurant industry is no exception.

Introduction

Controlling food costs is essential if you are interested in restaurant profit margin. I'd like to discuss a few options for implementing controls over your food costs. In practice, there are many ways you can create a control. Let's start with a definition:

According to a website affiliated with the NRA, "The seven stages (of food cost control) are purchasing, receiving, storage, issuing, preparation, cooking, and service."

If you include retailing and selling under service, I agree. If your controls over food costs do not cover the activities of selling, or retailing, you are not seeing the entire picture.

Be careful when researching food cost controls. There are too many sites that think food cost control is simply the formula for calculating Actual Food Cost as a percentage of sales. While this formula is useful as part of a control, by itself it is simply a measurement.