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Hoss’s Steak House improves decision making with Microsoft BI solution The Challenge Most companies like Hoss's have tremendous amounts of data they have collected from their various operational systems. The challenge for Hoss's decision makers was the inability to access and utilize all this data without the IT staff creating a report. This created a situation where the need to make a decision "now" based on actual data was almost impossible. "Getting the needed information now instead of requesting a report from IT and getting it later leads to better, faster decisions based on information rather than instinct." Dave Elliott, VP of Hoss's Steak and Sea House. Dept Managers at Hoss's needed accurate, up to date information concerning various areas of their 40+ restaurants, including guest counts, what meals were being sold, (Center Plate), what add-ons were being purchased with each (salad bar, side dishes, potato options etc.) In addition they wanted to be able to do comparisons to prior weeks and to the same time period in the previous year. The Solution Utilizing software Hoss's already owned, Empower Business Solutions built a data warehouse that enables Hoss's personnel to analyze data without IT intervention in "building" canned reports. Hoss's leveraged their existing investments in Microsoft technology. Empower took the raw data that was imported each night from the Point Of Sale (POS) Systems at each restaurant, and split all the measures (Guest Counts, Qty Sold, Price, Discounts, even TAX etc.) out by Server, Store, Hour of the day, Day of Week, Entrée ordered, if it was Dine in, Carry Out or Banquet, either Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner, even Table # . Then the information was brought back together in an Analysis Cube (Data Mart). This information is viewed with pivot tables in Excel, which allow the user to retrieve information with Drag and Drop style of Grid reports and all the graphing functionality of MS Excel. Such questions as Where are we now ascompared to last Week, Month, Quarter, or Year ? or I want to see a trend line of our average check amount over the last 13 weeks, becomes a simple exercise in Drag and Drop. The Benefits "Having POS data immediately accessible has greatly improved our decision making process. Getting the needed information now instead of requesting a report from IT and getting it later leads to better, faster decisions based on information rather than instinct. Its been surprising to us how often what we thought to be the case wasnt supported by the actual data. The ability to look at the numbers from multiple dimensions transforms raw data into information and then to actionable knowledge in a matter of minutes without any third party support. " Dave Elliott, VP Hoss's Steak and Sea House. "Data warehousing allows us to move away from the canned report (that traditionally survives long after it out lives it usefulness), to a robust analytical utility that enables us to slice and dice data giving us varied and three dimensional looks at what once was flat and narrowly focused information. Phil Sukenik, VP Hoss's Steak and Sea House.
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EMPOWER Business Solutions |