The Challenge
The client is a well-established premium restaurant group in Hong Kong and China. The major goal of any business in the restaurant industry is to improve the profit margin, optimize costs and produce attractive menus to pull in new and repeat customers. Ideally, all of this real time. It was a challenge for the management team to make data-driven business decisions quickly as they relied on dozens of inflexible and outdated tabular reports from different systems, including POS, marketing tools etc., in different formats. Put simply, the company was overwhelmed with data, but underwhelmed with insights. And here we are to help!
Actions
To synthesize the data from various sources in various formats, we dove into the data sources and analyzed data from all restaurant units that were running on various systems. As a result, we found common characteristics to structure and translate the findings into a robust and flexible data model that enabled the management to drill down into relationships between customer loyalty information, orders, menu items and more.
The next step was to make that data easily accessible and digestible within Salesforce. We established and scheduled an optimized data loading and maintenance process. This allowed the IT team to track down the sources of data and perform necessary maintenance when needed without disrupting the overall usability of the platform. And what if a new restaurant is opened? No problem, the team has the ability to add new venues and menu items easily.
At this point, the relevant data was accessible within a secure and elastic platform that would grow with the customer's operations. During the final stages of the project we delivered a data insights workshop in order to enable the customer to get the most value from the data. Within the data insights workshops we created, customized and filtered reports and visual dashboards based on the needs of the management, and also based on industry experience with other retail and hospitality outlets. As a result, we were able to activate data so that the management could independently draw critical insights from them.
Success
In less than 4 months the client gained a significant competitive advantage from data insights on a single platform. While their competition was still tweaking their Excel tables to try to run a highly dynamic business, our client was benefitting from a platform that is easy to use and maintain, visual, and accessible from a mobile device. They have achieved greater speed thanks to the real-time element and are now able to make superior data-driven business decisions specifically tailored to their needs.
As a result, they can expand the business faster, add new restaurants, focus on innovative menu items that actually sell based on data evidence, and improve customer experience significantly. Yesterday's reporting mess should not drive the demanding restaurant business of today!