Bob Andersen, president of The Great Greek Mediterranean Grill, reveals how he uses dynamic data sets to uncover patterns, make better decisions and solve problems.
Data analytics may be the sharpest tool in your operations toolbox. It can help you understand your customers better, using feedback and other instruments that reveal their preferences and behavior. Accurate use of the data you collect will increase guest satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately bringing you more profitability. In addition, data allows you to optimize various aspects of restaurant operations, such as menu item prep, portion control, inventory management, and staffing levels.
By identifying inefficiencies and streamlining processes restaurant operators can reduce costs, minimize waste and enhance overall efficiency.
At The Great Greek Mediterranean Grill, we use dynamic data sets to uncover patterns, trends and other insights, make better decisions, and solve problems. Here are four restaurant operation areas that can benefit from collecting and leveraging data:
1. Labor costs and performance: Management teams have full visibility of sales and labor performance with analytic tools that enable real-time decision-making for truly strategic staffing. Data also can provide feedback on the staff’s goals vs. their actual performance.
2. Menu selection: Accurate information on what to serve doesn’t just reduce food waste but also impacts the speed of service and overall customer satisfaction. Having the proper amount of food on hand and ready to serve can be a game-changer.
3. Management of multiple locations: Whether your locations are across town or across the country, you can quickly review elements like staffing, menu, and guest traffic. Each restaurant can have its own performance metric and only adjust unit-level areas. For example, menu mix could be different and require different par levels, or peak hours on the weekend may require additional labor in one location but not another.
4. Effective marketing programs: Viewing a wide spectrum of data can help you spot trends and design marketing efforts that help drive additional traffic, increase check averages, and more return visits. Rewards, text, and email loyalty programs are a great way to reach segmented audiences with specific campaigns to drive sales cost-effectively and efficiently.
Crunching the numbers
The key to effective data management isn’t the information itself but what you do with it. We take ours and feed it into proprietary tools, dashboards, and reports customized for us. This allows us to deploy informed decision-making with the same eyes and enables our leadership team, restaurant operators, and managers to make better decisions, improve performance, enhance customer experience, and drive innovation, ultimately leading to growth and success.
We must take immediate action on some data, such as poor customer experience feedback and low labor efficiency rates, while other data sets are evaluated over a medium or long-term horizon. Menu items, for example, are evaluated cross-functionally over a long-term timeframe against various models like menu mix, price elasticity, and contribution margin. Operations, marketing, and training teams lead any additions or subtractions to our menu.
If you haven’t yet taken up this critical tool, I suggest starting with the basics, such as sales, menu items, and labor data. Get to know your restaurant business by studying the data by the hour, day part, day of the week, weekly, and period. If you have multiple units, put them side by side. You may be very surprised at how different they may be. In addition, opportunities for improvements in marketing efficiencies, sales, and customer preference will begin to become clear.
Today, small restaurant operators have access to the same abundance of data as large operators. Any restaurant brand can benefit greatly by understanding where they can collect data and how to organize it so that it is readily available, easy to use and relevant to their business objectives.
