SCG
Background
Elephant Bar, part of the S.B. Restaurant Company family, operates more than 30 restaurants, primarily located in California. The increasingly popular restaurant had an aggressive business strategy with a projected growth plan of 20% to 30% per year. The company sought to combat any potential IT challenges that might evolve from its rapid growth before it became problematic.

Situation
The company needed a business intelligence infrastructure that would meet the requirements for integration. Elephant Bar did not have a means of identifying labor costs across its various locations and it had no way of establishing benchmarks for employee productivity and assigning a corresponding rank. There were no provisions to evaluate menu mix, track orders or assess profitability by customer meal.

Key Goals
  • Quickly generate accurate facilities and financial reports
  • Create a small, stable system that would introduce employees to the possibilities of a full data warehouse and BI platform
  • Provide a suite of reports to help identify inefficiencies in store processes and menu mixes
Solution
With SQL Server Analysis Services as the foundation, SCG implemented two MSAS cubes using data from Great Plains for the first, and POS data for the second. This approach enabled SCG to build real-time financial and human resources reports that assessed profit, loss, budgeting, sales, and employee performance. SCG also built a suite of ProClarity workbooks to present interactive views of financial and facilities operations facts.

Results
Elephant Bar now has an accurate and reliable system that can easily handle both present and future business intelligence needs. The new reporting system allows managers and executives to access reports based on a variety of criteria, including profit by menu item, employee productivity, and more. Restaurant managers are able to forecast daily ordering and staffing needs quickly and easily, thereby increasing operating profits, decreasing costs, and gaining the business agility necessary to successsfully meet the demands of the highly competitive restaurant industry.

  challenges

data integration

reporting accuracy
  technologies

Windows Server

Data Transformation Services

Analysis Services

Proclarity

Great Plains 8.0
  results

profitability analysis

menu mix analysis

daily sales reporting