Response

The reasons for high pour costs can be varied from; training issues, staff consumption, sweet hearting, tip enhancement and unfortunately theft. It is a well known fact that in a bar operation, up to 20% of your inventory can disappear without any income.

Solution

Take control of inventory, cash and process. Take stock frequently – each day or after every shift. Use beer flow control to manage the relationship between consumption and sales. Use video technology with POS integration to see actual transactions and increase visibility. Demand the use of the ‘Comp’ button on your POS and demand that all tips go through the POS. Banish staff carrying cash whilst in duty and maintain the right to search.

Response

Human nature means that when the boss is there, staff are on their best behavior and in some cases the opposite can be true to varying degrees.

Solution

As well as setting operational disciplines and training them frequently to your team, consider the use of video technology to see your operations at any time from wherever you are. Immediate access to meaningful operational performance can also provide you with clues to your teams behavior and performance.

Response

Beer is a high volume, low cost and difficult to monitor commodity. The issue could be simply a training one and over pouring but as likely is the practice of some servers giving beer away to enhance their cash tips.

Solution

Beer flow control systems are used widely in the UK for example. These systems monitor every pint of beer served and through reference to the POS system you can correlate the relationship between sales and consumption – in real time.

Response

This is a common problem for multi outlet operators. The process of gathering the information can be cumbersome and in a high revenue, small margin industry the smallest thing can go wrong and by the time you learn about it you could be 37 or 44 days too late to rectify the problem. Clearly, this could be disastrous for any business.

Solution

Through Intelli-Cater^©, operators can have real time information and Profit & Loss for individual sites, regions or for a Company as a whole. Intelli-Cater^© aggregates the information from various sources on a real-time basis and through tailor-made dashboards delivers the information that you need to manage your business more effectively and tackle issues as they arise not in retrospect.

Response

Dashboards are a tailor made information snapshot on the key metrics of your business. Dashboards can be created to reflect your own business requirements but also tailored to provide functional information within to make departmental and Company wide decisions more relevant and effective.

Solution

Intelli-Cater^© gathers and aggregates information from various sources across your business, including; POS, Payroll, Purchasing, Menu Management and Sales. Intelli-Cater^© provides data on key metrics such as; Sales, Labor, GP, Training Alerts, Visa Alerts, Staff Turnover and practically any metric you need to manage your business more effectively.

Response

Voids, deletions and transfers are all potential indicators of the practice of ‘Wagon Wheeling’ taking place in your operations as a complex means of theft.

Solution

Through Intelli-Cater^© you can set up automated alerts to your phone or email. You set the acceptable tolerance and get immediately alerted when that is exceeded. You can then drill down to questionable transactions through Intelli-Sight^©.

Response

Lack of production consistency will effect Gross profit Margin and one good example is a Pizza Chain which in one outlet was using 2oz of cheese more than others on their toppings – this was costing the business $100,000 a year!

Solution

Intelli-Cater^© includes a recipe builder, menu planner and E-Procurement which are all linked together.  This means that the system can generate the relationship between the standard production procedure, the procurement of commodities and when analyzed with sales will tell you where the problem lies – in this instance, it will tell you that the outlet is purchasing more cheese for the number of pizzas sold – guiding you to the problem – immediately.

Response

A common challenge for single and multi outlet operations. You enter into an arrangement with a new vendor and common practice is to tempt you into their pricing structure on the emotive items such as bread, eggs, fries and milk – maximizing their own profit through the ‘tail’ of less emotive items and catching you unawares. Also, price changes are very difficult to track as prices fluctuate and can have a devastating effect on your Gross Profit.

Solution

Through Intelli-Cater^©, the E-Procurement module takes care of this. Generally, price files are agreed in advance, typically, quarterly and as orders are placed (electronically), goods received (and checked off on the system), the invoice arrives and is price matched automatically – this immediately highlights any price variations, over charges or phantom invoices.

Response

The challenge with any multi outlet operation is the consistency of purchasing of commodities and suppliers. By using different vendors, brands and products, purchasing power is diluted losing businesses some times significant commercial benefit.

Solution

The Intelli-Cater^© E-Procurement system monitors every single commodity line purchased and at what price. For  a multiple operator who purchases 1 million tins of beans (for example) each year, 3 different brands and from 5 different vendors – the consolidation to one brand, one vendor can be significant in terms of both consistency and cost.

Response

Alarmingly, in the USA, over $50B is lost each year as a result of employee theft. In the restaurant industry it is recognized that 20% of all commodity cost is lost. Theft, unfortunately is an issue and Clients who put controls in place can ensure that they keep honest employees, honest.

Solution

Through Intelli-Sight^© and POS integration, we can provide owners immediate alerts when suspicious transactions such as deletes, voids and transfers are occurring. The video technology captures those transactions and with time and date stamped video, you can see the key strokes overlaid onto the video in real time and really understand the nature of each suspicious transaction.

Response

Labor is a restaurant businesses biggest cost and control is critical - In the State of California for example, it is a requirement that employees take breaks and the Employer is ultimately responsible for managing this.

Solution

Intelli-Cater^© gathers labor hours through employees swiping in and swiping out through the POS System – this tracks overall labor hours and prepares payroll rosters and provides immediate alerts to Supervisors for break times.

Response

Many of the most successful retailers gather statistics on this important relationship and gather data store by store which they can reference against demographics and location to enable them to make informed decisions on new store openings.

Solution

Intelli-Sight^© can gather this information from a camera located at the front entrance – this can count the passing traffic and through video analytics count the customers and even queue and dwell times. When cross referenced against transactions, this can become a very valuable tool.

Response

Individual privacy is an issue as is individual safety and security of your premises and getting the balance right is an important ethical, moral and commercial consideration.

Solution

Intelli-Sight^© is a business tool and not one for invading peoples privacy. We recommend that signage is used at the entrance informing customers that video technology is being employed for their protection and reassurances that the archive is used responsibly at all times.

Response

As with any business, the cost and risk of change have to be considered along with the benefits of change.

Solution

CATERForce^® is very mindful of this dilemma and recommend that our systems are deployed gradually, starting with the priorities in your business first. With full implementation support, training and step change management we can make the transfer seamless and gain commercial benefits from Day 1 of implementation.

Response

We understand that operators are by nature, busy people and that there may well be various pieces of information available to you. We believe the differentiation is that through CATERForce^®, all the information is in one place, feeds from each other and provides real time automated dashboards, providing unprecedented visibility to your business.

Solution

CATERForce^® provides real time dashboards across your business that provide meaningful management information on order to drive key decisions and make business improvement – immediately. The solutions provide you with real time profit & Loss and key indicators across your business.

Response

The calculation of solution cost is different for every business but does range between $100 and $2,000 per month, per outlet or in extreme cases, less than the cost of a general assistant on minimum wage.

Solution

Our solutions are designed to be cash generative from day 1 – for example the monthly business improvement shall be greater than the investment, generating an immediate cash improvement.

Response

Each restaurant group is different, has different challenges and different short and mid term needs and that is why we tailor our solution in each, case by case. The target business improvement is between 2% and 15% improvement in Gross Profit margin that can translate down to your bottom line.

Solution

The CATERForce^® portfolio has been designed to deliver business improvement in the following specific areas:

• Protect revenues
• Protect people, property & assets
• Provide real time information
• Reduce cost
• Increase efficiency and effectiveness
• Provide visibility

Response

CATERForce^® solutions use Comma Separated Values (CSV) protocols to gather the data from your POS. This is a simple format and once the data from your POS is matched with our own data capture the process is automatic.

Solution

Intelli-Cater^© works with most POS systems through the CSV protocols. Intelli-Sight^© is a little more complex and where POS Integration is a requirement, we work with the most prevalent systems including; MICROS, POSI Touch, Aloha and Squirrel.

Response

Clearly, with labor being such a large business cost, the cost and benefit of streamlining systems has to be a consideration. Our approach to this question is that  yes, CATERForce^® will save time, however, this time saved when reinvested into business improvement can have an overwhelming result on qualitative measures.

Solution

Our solutions collect, aggregates and makes sense of data in one place and undoubtedly creates time efficiencies, some of which include;

• Reduction in travelling time to sites
• Reduction in travelling costs and expenses
• Reduction in accounting costs
• Increased visibility of sites
• Increased efficiency of support resources
• Increased efficiency of operations resource
• Outlet management more accountable

Response

No. Intelli-Cater^© is a management tool that provides real time visibility to your business and is not a replacement for your accounting systems.

Solution

Through CSV protocols, Intelli-Cater^© feeds information into your accounting systems for verification by your accounts team to produce your Management Accounts and Year End Accounts.

Response

Your data is privileged to you and you alone. Through different authorization levels you can decide who has access to what data and to what level. We will help you set this up and once up and running you can change authorization levels as required.

Solution

We will identify your organizations structure and set up the system so that outlet management can see only their outlet, Regional Managers can see only their region and so on. Equally, functional personnel can only see their own department of responsibility such as HR and Purchasing and of course the leaders of the business can have access throughout with tailored dashboards for each type of User.

Response

Yes. Your data is kept in secure data centers with emergency recovery data backup at alternate locations ensuring that the data is 100%, totally secure at all times.

Solution

The system has lost only 4 minutes of functionality in the past 3 years. This was one incident and in any event all data was retained through the emergency recover mechanism that we have as a safeguard for such events.

Response

Intelli-Pro^© provides a wide ranged of services to support your business on an as required basis which avoids the need for you to build expensive internal support resource and allows you to concentrate on your core business.

Solution

Intelli-Pro^© services are far reaching but include;

• Operations Consulting & Interim Management
• Property & lease services
• Human Resources
• Training services
• Procurement Consulting
• Financial Advisory
• Marketing & Branding