A leading chain of restaurants and entertainment complexes was unable to generate product sales and trending reports. They were forced to rely on administrative staff re-keying information from detailed reports into Excel spreadsheets for analysis. The process was slow and prone to errors, and consequently the reports were not trusted or frequently used. Managers of restaurants made decisions based on "gut feel" instead of numbers as support for decisions such as inventory stocking. Illustrating the lack of accuracy and credibility, several of the chainšs restaurants touted their status as the top selling restaurant in the chain.
The project team delivered an enterprise data warehouse using Microsoft SQL Server 7, Microsoft Data Transformation Services, Microsoft SQL Server OLAP Services (what is called Analysis Services in SQL Server 2000), and Proclarity to support analysts and sales managers. This allowed them to report daily sales numbers for every location from a central data repository with several years of historical data.
At the completion of the project, store managers were able to log into a custom intranet portal to view year on year comparison figures at monthly, quarterly, and annual levels, for all locations, individual locations, and regions. They were able to monitor rolling quarterly and half-quarter trends, and store managers dramatically improved accuracy in inventory management, ordering, and reducing waste.
At corporate headquarters, operations directors, sales management, and top executives regularly turned to information provided out of the data mart to make strategic decisions and pricing and presentation (i.e. menu decisions) decisions based on sales trends. One of the largest returns on investment was better staffing accuracy, a key restaurant cost, based on daily sales fluctuations (sales information was gathered at fifteen minute increments).
