Sizzler USA of Culver, California, has been in business for more than 50 years, but the management team felt it was taking too much time and effort to collect and analyze the data their restaurants generated.
As Debbie Frazier, one of Sizzler’s technology consultants, says, “We wanted a single snapshot of our business data.”
Sizzler’s new management team and Frazier’s company, The G2 Services Group, auditioned five information management companies in a “Bake Off,” and selected Mirus Restaurant Solutions of Houston, Texas, to address the issue.
“Mirus was able to stream a number of different applications into a single dashboard, enabling Sizzler to extract the information it needed,” Frazier says.
Equally importantly, Mirus’s Exception-Based Reporting feature allowed Sizzler to hone in on key bits of company-wide, restaurant, and even daypart information, such as food cost, overtime, and coupon redemption. Especially useful was the “Only with Data” alert feature. Sizzler can set parameters for items such as food or labor costs, and the system will highlight only items that exceed those preset variances, expediting corrective action.
Dave Bennett, CEO of Mirus, notes that the Mirus exception-based reporting feature accelerates the decision-making process for multi-unit operators, particularly those with a variety of legacy systems.
”Our ability to combine data from all of their systems into a consistent enterprise solution allows Sizzler to make fact-based decisions quickly,” Bennett says.
The system highlights information categories that the operators pre-select. Operators eliminate the time-consuming process of collecting and formatting data for action and instead analyze and control it for fast response.