The Path to Reporting & Analytics: Establishing an Enterprise Data Warehouse

The Client

The client owns and operates two fast casual brands with over 300 locations in the US and South America. They operate in the fast casual segment where convenience is the center of the operating model.

Both brands feature dine-in, drive thru, online ordering and catering.

CLIENT PROFILE
EMPLOYEES: 10,000+
INDUSTRY: Restaurants
HEADQUARTERS: Texas
FOUNDED: 2011
 

Key Challenges for The Restaurant

  • Multiple sources for the data scattered across different systems, and no single source of truth

  • No unified access to data across the organization

  • Access to information became too difficult

  • Difficulty incorporating data from new external sources

  • All reporting was produced manually, heavy dependence on Excel

  • No standard defined for the reports, metrics and business rules; there were too many being produced ad-hoc

  • More time spend massaging the data than analyzing it

Smartbridge has extensive experience in restaurant technology innovation

The Path Forward

The Smartbridge team conducted a thorough assessment of all aspects of the business and IT operations. There were several stages of the assessment that took place before final recommendations were compiled and presented to the client:

1. The team conducted preliminary discovery of business operations and IT infrastructure. Then we focused on identifying the demand for information and prioritized that information based on the level of importance to the leadership in order for them to gain the best insight into the business.

2. Next, the team assessed the capabilities to deliver that information and identified gaps that needed to be filled with new data in order to provide more holistic insight into how the business as a whole was doing.

3. Finally, the Smartbridge team of experts created a recommended roadmap that was divided in phases, and was spanned over 2 years.

Smartbridge is an implementation and resell partner for MicroStrategy.
Learn more about MicroStrategy >

Establishing an Enterprise Data Warehouse

The first phase of the project has been completed, and now the client has a new Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) that provides a single source of truth for the organization. This was the first data warehouse implementation at the company. In addition, there are ETL processes and workflow in place that provide automated data updates multiple times a day, enabling the analysts to work with almost-real-time data.

The client chose MicroStrategy and their BI platform, and the Smartbridge BI experts used it to build and provide reporting infrastructure for the end-users. Now end users can utilize a number of self-service reports that were created, and create self-made custom-tailored versions that fit their business needs.

In addition, our BI team built automated reports that are generated and delivered to a pre-set distribution list, virtually eliminating labor-intensive process of manually creating those reports, and neutralizing any possibilities for errors that could’ve occurred with the manual report creation.

Keep Reading: A Restaurant Group’s Journey of Building an Enterprise-Wide BI Program

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