POS Innovations: Know Thy Customer

A new business-intelligence tool feeds marketers at Church’s Chicken transaction-level detail.

By David Farkas, Senior Editor -- Chain Leader, 10/1/2007

Like many restaurant marketers, Marc Butler seeks to understand the purchase intentions of his customers. High-margin items like side dishes and soft drinks, which nearly everyone buys, are a snap to promote, but precisely when and to whom remain a guess at best.

“We’ve had a 99-cent chicken sandwich on the menu for about two years,” says Butler, senior director of product marketing for Church’s Chicken, which operates and franchises about 1,600 units worldwide. “Intuitively, we know they order sides and drinks with it and don’t just order a sandwich, but we can’t quantify that at that point.”

Power Tool

If a new business-intelligence tool the company rolled out in spring delivers on its promise, Butler and his team should soon have their answer. “This tool is going to do wonders for us in the next few months,” he adds.

He’s referring to a data-management system from Mirus Restaurant Solutions, a Houston company specializing in technology for multiunit companies. The product reports exceptions to district managers and above. The report might alert market leaders, who manage up to seven units, to order more chicken or that a cashier’s register is consistently $20 short.

The chain initially introduced the system in its 250 corporate restaurants to trim food costs. “Making a 1 percent improvement is a big achievement, and we went after it,” says Church’s CIO Alan Stukalsky, a former PeopleSoft executive who joined the Atlanta-based chain last year. He oversaw the tool’s test and rollout early this year.

Stukalsky won’t say how much the company pays monthly for the Web-based service but boasts that franchisees who install the system will get a good deal from Mirus. “We negotiated a good contract,” he claims.

Tom Sacco, a spokesman for Mirus, also declines to reveal the amount Church’s is charged but says it is “substantially lower” than the $50 per-unit price a small chain might pay for the service, which includes collecting transaction-level data from each unit, storing them and generating daily reports by 8 a.m.

Working Smarter, Not Harder

Butler is eager to ramp up the data his department collects from Mirus. So far, he says, reports have made him more productive by providing more timely data than the back-office system alone. He estimates seeing 25 percent more reports but cautions the total number of reports isn’t the point.

“We are able to get through them at a quicker pace and focus on other things. It is more of a productivity improvement than the sheer volume of reports,” he explains.

Still, he offers, “We’re only scratching the surface.”

The pay-off, several months away, is when he is able to determine who buys what and when. Having that piece of information, he adds, “will change the way we evaluate our business.”

Find out how Wendy’s data-management software eases purchasing and frees up managers’ time. Read Taking Orders.