Billion-Dollar Food Service Leader Solves Business Intelligence Challenges With IDA
A leading company in the food service industry with more than 400 franchise restaurants was in a rapid growth stage. They wanted comprehensive business intelligence and data analysis to improve operational efficiency and help with expansion plans. The company plans to double its locations and was struggling with its current BI platform.
The Challenge
They had adopted a leading traditional enterprise BI system and spent nine months trying to build it up and customize it. However, they lacked both clarity and simplicity in finding and drilling down to data points to reveal the insights for smart decisions.
While they had developed dashboards, they were mainly static and did not provide an easy pathway for analysis. They could drill down to individual sites or data points, but struggled to find deeper insights. For example, they could look at two stores and see how performance stacked up, but had difficulty drilling down to find the root cause of any discrepancies to find ways for improvement.
In short, they wanted an easy way to slice and dice data, compare store locations, and uncover patterns to establish benchmarks and improve performance.
The Solution
Intuitive Data Analytics provides the IDA platform for a comprehensive solution for the company’s business intelligence needs. In a short time, IDA was able to provide them with the deep data analysis they wanted in an easy-to-use solution that fueled discovery.
Not only could they compare top-performing locations against poor performers, but they could break them down geographically, by product line or menu item, time of day, and dining methods. Without being restricted to prebuilt dashboards, they could use a finger or voice to navigate data and uncover correlations.
While other BI platforms have robust tool sets, AI often requires training on large datasets to accurately see patterns and deliver recommendations. It can often take a considerable amount of time to train it before it’s effective. IDA does not depend on training data or massive datasets. It uses the data you provide and it’s immediately useful.
The Results
Data discovery improved immediately. Team members were able to find significant insights to help inform decisions.
They were also able to bring in additional sources to help refine insights. For example, when examining two stores that showed diverse results, yet had similar patterns across sales, menu, time of day, etc., they could apply broader demographics, such as area income or ethnicity.
They might break out data not just against their metrics, but against data such as city, metro, or rural locations, locations to schools, military bases, or public gathering places, age groups and income levels, etc. They can also inject additional parameters to predict future performance, such as which side of the street they are on or whether the route is on the way to work or the way home. This data not only helps to better forecast store performance, but also helps decide where expansion will be most successful.
By looking at data in any combination, they did not have to reinvent the wheel. They could now analyze data in any combination without having to rely on pre-built dashboards or pull-down menus. This helped them identify new locations for expansion, as well as set up baselines and performance goals for stores based on realistic expectations.
IDA provided an easy way for this company to get data insights and recommendations with clarity and simplicity. Discovery and insights now happen spontaneously, answering the company’s biggest questions instantly.
For more information:
- Cristina Hilado
- Info@IntuitiveDataAnalytics.com
- 626-838-5000
