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Family Restaurants and Koo Koo Roo Enterprises merged to form Prandium Inc. in 1998. Prandium, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., operates more than 300 restaurants in 28 states nationwide. Known for its El Torito, Koo Koo Roo, Hamburger Hamlet, Chi Chi's, and Casa Gallardo restaurant names, Prandium is the largest operator of full-service Mexican restaurants in the world. Situation In the restaurant business, daily and weekly sales analysis is critical. After the merger of Family Restaurants and Koo Koo Roo Enterprises, Prandium corporate management required the ability to report sales by chain or division. Since the individual companies had unique systems, report delivery methods, and analysis needs, Prandium needed a way to integrate the diverse systems. The company faced several challenges. Although El Torito was already analyzing daily sales, only one employee had the knowledge necessary to extract data from the legacy system. Chi Chi's legacy system was too costly to maintain. Koo Koo Roo's reporting system was unreliable due to scalability issues, and Hamburger Hamlet had no method of analyzing sales trends in place. In order to solve the company's diverse reporting problems, Prandium's IT department kicked off an initiative to deliver a data warehouse that would integrate data from multiple systems and address the unique reporting and analysis needs of each restaurant chain's management. The company brought SCG in to develop a controlled, scalable, hands-off environment. Solution Solutions Consulting Group worked with Prandium's IT staff and end users to design a sales data analysis model, and then captured this model in AppsMart, which was used to map data from multiple POS sources into each of the four data marts. Cost-efficient OLAP Services were designed to provide resources to analysts and power users through Excel 2000 pivot tables. Production reports were also developed using several reporting tools, including Microsoft Access and Crystal Reports. Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 was selected as the primary component of the architecture not only for the scalability of the relational database engine, but also for its DTS and OLAP Services components. Four individual star schema data marts were deployed, one for each of Prandium's major restaurant chains - El Torito, Chi Chi's, Hamburger Hamlet, and Koo Koo Roo. In the new systems, daily POS data is uploaded from over 300 restaurant locations on a daily basis. Data Transformation Services (DTS) scripts are used to populate SQL Server relational star schema data marts, and then data is transferred into an OLAP Services cube. The cubes have five dimensions, six measures, and 20-50% aggregations. SCG used AppSmart, a product of Data Warehouse Alliance Partner AppsCo Software Ltd., to develop the dimensional models. The system was deployed in a few weeks- a fraction of the time usually required. AppsMart is a rapid application development tool for building data marts. Featuring an intuitive "Wizard"-based interface, AppsMart enables organizations to focus on business requirements and then automatically builds a system to support them. The end result is a data mart that more closely meets user requirements. AppsMart integrates all business intelligence components of SQL Server, including OLAP Services, DTS, Office 2000 and Microsoft Repository. Results The S.M.A.R.T Data Warehouse allows each major chain to monitor daily sales trends and respond quickly to changing business cycles. For example, if sales shoot up the first days of the week, management is able to respond by increasing labor hours immediately. The SQL Server 7.0 architecture enables many capabilities including:
Since Excel is familiar to most end users, there has been a natural transition to using Excel 2000 pivot table services for queries to the database. Often users answer their own questions rather than relying on IT personnel. And the usability and hands-off capabilities of SQL Server 7.0 have provided Prandium with an environment they can easily maintain with internal IT staff. |
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