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Chicago Pizza & Brewery operates 30 restaurants throughout the U.S and employs more than 3,000 people. The company specializes in Chicago-style, deep-dish pizza and handcrafted beers. In 2003, the Chicago Pizza & Brewery posted revenues of $103 million, and was growing at a rate of more than 20% per year. Situation To handle current expansion and prepare for future growth, the company needed a way to provide business analytics to managers throughout the company. Store managers were spending too much time assembling and disseminating data to headquarters. Middle management was also spending inordinate amounts of time compiling and distributing data rather than analyzing it for trends that could guide critical decisions. The company needed a more efficient, Web-based solution that was highly available and highly scalable, allowing access to daily POS data, thereby giving managers greater agility in responding to changing market forces and trends. Chicago Pizza & Brewery also needed a system that would be up and running within six months, in time to deliver benefits in the 2004 fiscal year. Key goals:
Chicago Pizza & Brewery turned to SCG and Custom Business Solutions (CBS) for help. SCG provided technical expertise and development resources, and CBS focused on developing a Web-based dashboard and reporting capabilities. In evaluating reporting technologies, SCG chose SQL Server Reporting Services because of its ease of use in rapidly creating highly scalable, sophisticated Web reports to meet Chicago Pizza's wide range of functional requirements. Reporting Services provided a comprehensive, server-based platform for creating, managing, and delivering both traditional, paper-oriented reports and interactive Web-based reports delivering real-time information to support daily operations and decisions at Chicago Pizza. SCG used Microsoft Visual Studio.NET development system to customize SQL Server Reporting Services to Chicago Pizza's needs. SCG developers used Visual Basic.NET development system to construct the restaurant-level components and server-side components that marshal the transported data into SQL Server. Visual Studio was used to develop, debug, and manage all the tables, views, and stored procedures inside the SQL Server database. SCG used Microsoft ASP.NET to develop the Web portal and dashboard. Reporting Services was used to develop all reports accessible from the Web portal. The application cleans, scrubs, and validates the data, daily or as a multi-day scheduled event, then transports the data to a server component residing at the restaurant's home office. The server component inserts the data into a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition database. The records transferred include a complete POS transactional database along with pre-aggregated data sets. Additionally, because it's a server-based reporting solution, SQL Server Reporting Services provides enterprise-level scalability and reliability. Chicago Pizza can expand operations, confident that its reporting infrastructure can handle thousands of Web-based clients accessing the same core reports with no performance degradation. The primary challenges were overcoming requirements for the reporting application because it needed to be accessible to everyone regardless of location through an HTML client. In addition, the significant formatting requirements presented a challenge. Enterprise reporting tools and products such as Cognos or BusinessObjects, are high-end and require significant investment. SCG evaluated these as well as custom development options. Additionally, it was necessary to keep license requirements to a minimum to allow this product to be utilized by other restaurant chains. Finally, the client needed a solution as soon as possible. SCG had no time to waste. Results With this system, Chicago Pizza personnel have access to a live view of enterprise data through a standard Web browser. The time that managers would have spent laboriously typing POS data into spreadsheets is redirected toward generating additional revenue. The system has significantly enhanced Chicago Pizza's overall efficiency and profitability. The new system enables both Finance and Operations Departments at Chicago Pizza to manage the business using the same set of financial and statistical data. Using this system, managers of each restaurant can post financial and statistical data daily to a central repository, where it is immediately available for analysis. The reporting system uses the same data to process daily postings directly to the company's financial system, thus enabling easy production of weekly profit and loss reports. By seamlessly integrating timely and accurate data directly into the company's core financial and reporting systems, Chicago Pizza has enabled its operations managers to react proactively to drive the business to its profitability targets. The reporting portal also lets the company pull data from any source, as well as enables multiple output formats such as Web browsers and Microsoft Office System programs. Managers get powerful reporting capabilities in the context of familiar Windows-based productivity tools without having to learn a new environment. Using SQL Server Reporting Services, Chicago Pizza can easily export report data to Microsoft Office programs. Store managers and middle managers have the ability to immediately access live business data, including ordering and labor requirements, allowing them to adjust restaurant operations sooner. Managed reports can be executed either on demand or on a specified schedule, and are cached for consistency and performance. Chicago Pizza can create one companywide report and assign permissions. Chicago Pizza expects significant administrative savings due to increased management productivity. Officials at the company expect at least $65,000 in savings per year by substantially reducing reporting time. Managers can redirect time saved, ensuring the restaurant is running efficiently, responding to trends and meeting changes and customer demands to increase revenues. |
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