The first Dewey’s Pizza opened in 1998 in Oakley, in the City of Cincinnati, Ohio. With a reputation built on excellent service, hand-tossed artisan pizzas and gourmet salads, there are now more than 20 Dewey’s Pizza restaurants in the Cincinnati, Dayton, Cleveland, Columbus and St. Louis markets.
I had a chance to catch up with Jason at a recent conference and learn more about his experience with Mirus.
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Jason Busch is the owner of Jaxx Consulting & Technology, a restaurant and retail consulting firm. Through his company he serves as the Point of Sale Manager for Dewey's Pizza. He was involved with the selection, implementation and continued expanded use of Mirus as an enterprise reporting tool for Dewey's. He has been a Mirus client since 2008. |
How would you describe Mirus?
An amazing enterprise reporting tool. I say amazing because we’ve seen a lot of them and Mirus doesn’t try to be anything more than what they set out to be. They don’t try and be another back office, although you can do some inventory on there and you can do some forecasting.
I love the fact that you can create your own reports, so it’s a data warehouse too in a sense. And the flexibility. It’s an amazing reporting product you can write anything you want to but don’t be scared because they’re there for you to help you do it. Generally speaking it’s been the best company in our POS networking system. We’re talking when you have to work with data, telephony, firewall, POS, payroll and you guys tend to be the most responsive out of them all.
How is Mirus better than other restaurant reporting software?
Responsiveness, the tool is slick and easy to use, it loads very well, the reports are easy to make. I went for about a year without writing a report and I was able to jump back on that horse in about 10 or 15 minutes, even with just that simple training I had the first time. Writing about maybe 40 or 50 of them right off the bat, took a year off and I was able to get right back on and I was impressed with that.
How are you using Mirus?
We use it for mostly for C-level and area manager reporting. They can see how the other stores are doing and what they’re doing. They can’t get that in the store and it fosters kind of a competition sometimes.
How do you get others in your organization to use Mirus reports?
We try and give them a different flavor of the reports making them comparative. Giving them data elements that they might not have in the store. The reality is we might move to another POS system and if that happens we want them to have the consistency that Mirus provides.
How have you been able to measure and improve restaurant performance?
With our comparable reports and fostering competitiveness between stores. That actually was an ancillary benefit we didn’t throw into the calculation. We figured everybody would just want to see how everybody else was doing and the push to do better than all the others was an unseen benefit. It sparked a little bit of change. It really did change the culture. We didn’t have that before. Those two pieces, the competitiveness and the comparables to last year’s sales were the two big things right off the bat for us.
Tell me about your comparative reports.
The comparative reports are really good and seeing how you did against last year really gave the store managers a great tool to use because we didn’t have those exact numbers coming out of our POS. The way we presented them on this report, to do it on our POS we would have had to jump through hoops basically, it could have been done but it would have been a lot of work. With this it was real simple just putting that data element right there and the way it was displayed was perfect. The store managers print that stuff out when they’re doing scheduling and when they’re doing their forecast.
Why would someone need Mirus if they’ve got reports coming from their POS?
I’d say the vast majority of Point of Sales don’t let you create your own reports, everything is canned. If you want a report you have to submit a software request, then they have to decide whether they want to approve it and if you’re a small fish in a big pond you might not get it. As you grow, whether you’re a franchisee who wants to buy another franchisee or you buy stores from others you’ve got that flexibility of having all those different types of point of sales systems right at your fingertips that are already integrated and I think that’s a huge advantage. Net sales between net sales of different point of sale systems is the same across the board with Mirus. That basically takes apples and oranges and says here this is fruit juice, this is how it’s supposed to be.
What impact have you experienced using Mirus?
In general it’s been a very positive one. From the multiple Mirus User Conferences that we’ve been to we’ve slowly learned that we need to move to exception based reporting tools more so than what we have right now. I just started that with a very simple form, which is our polling. We get a polling message everyday and as we grow I realized you don’t have to press the button on your email to go down to see how many stores are in the red instead of green. I said, this is stupid I should just pull an exception report to see who hasn’t polled. So now we’re using that.
You don’t have to see how many stores are doing well, see how many stores are doing poorly or see what’s wrong and that saves you from having to go through the whole gamut. Slowly but surely we’ve been doing that. So the impact not only from the product itself but from the community on how to use the product better has been just as much of an influence.
Anything else?
We really do love the interface. We like seeing the changes that come up. I like that they’re small changes, nothing drastically happens. I like the agile programming cycle where you’re constantly coming up with things, updating constantly and it’s not just once a year. I love being able to make custom reports.
Ready to spark change?
Thoughts?
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About Mirus:
Mirus is a multi-unit restaurant reporting software used by operations, finance, IT, and marketing.
For more information, please visit: www.mirus.com
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