What exactly is data mining? It’s the practice of examining large databases in order to generate new information that can make your restaurant business that much more successful. The data mining process identifies patterns and trends and enables restaurant operators to sort through useful information to quickly get answers to pertinent questions. Restaurant executives can use this information to increase revenues, cut costs, and decrease unnecessary risks in their business. Additionally, large databases contain hidden insights that can help your restaurants improve customer satisfaction, forecast sales and ensure the success of marketing initiatives.
A Wealth of Information
Your POS system along with Labor and Inventory tools contain data. Lots and lots of data. They host a huge amount of information about what is happening in your restaurants. Add to that the data derived from Guest Loyalty programs, General Ledger, Kitchen Display, Drive Through Timer, reservation systems, weather reports, social media, review sites, the list goes on and on...That’s a lot of data!
But how do you currently merge the information from these sources in order to get a deeper understanding of what’s REALLY happening, on a more granular level?
Furthermore, how often is your staff having to put out fires across all departments? Access to the right data before hand could have fixed the problems before they occurred. Discovery of new information through the understanding of trends, patterns and their correlation can help you sift and navigate a lot more seamlessly to get to the bottom of things.
Delving Deeper
Customer attraction, retention and prediction are vital in the restaurant industry. Restaurant companies can offer more targeted campaigns when they are better equipped with the right tools.
Here are a few details you can examine to learn more about your business and be able to take the right actions:
- Customer Profiling – Who are they and what are their preferences? Which items are they ordering in conjunction with other items? This knowledge can be used to create a specific marketing initiative.
- Forecasting – Which menu items need to be prepared and when to reorder inventory? This insight will assure more efficient meal preparation and menu planning.
- Labor Allocation – What are your busiest day parts and are customers being serviced in a timely fashion? Managers can staff the venues to provide improved service with insight into average service time relative to customer demand
To Summarize
Data mining in restaurants can be applied to a plethora of areas to help executives in finance, operations and marketing sift through details that are otherwise difficult to access and evaluate. They can examine productivity, customer patterns and behavior, site selection, forecasting, menu engineering and promotions. The goal is to take disparate data sources and extract information for greater decision making.
You need data mining software to complete a more in depth analysis of all activities to find irregularities and patterns and predict outcomes in order to grow your business.
A Data Mining solution allows you to:
- Understand what is pertinent and make better use of that information
- Sort through the monotonous data to find the exceptions
- Make more informed and better decisions faster
Restaurant companies at the forefront of their industry are collecting real time data on their sales, staff performance, inventory, food costs, accounting, scheduling, competitors and customer behavior by merging the information that they already have with all sorts of data from outside sources in order to be more informed and get ahead of the game.
Convinced yet? Ready to start mining?
Thoughts
Do you believe there is value in leveraging your restaurant data?
About Mirus:
Mirus is a multi-unit restaurant reporting software used by operations, finance, marketing, and IT.
For more information, visit: www.mirus.com
Watch Mirus demonstrations and client insights on our YouTube Channel.
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