CraftWorks Restaurants and Breweries proudly serve the finest craft beer and made-from-scratch creative cuisine. With nearly 200 restaurants operating under 14 different brands, it employs close to 12,000 people in serving approximately 80,000 guests each day.

Its restaurants range from traditional casual-dining concepts to fine-dining white tablecloth establishments.

Its largest brands include Old Chicago, Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurants, and Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery.

With more than 70 of the locations featuring fresh-brewed beer on-site, it is the world’s leading operator of brewery restaurants.

For CraftWorks, operating a successful and growing business had several challenges. Management needed not only visibility and accessibility to their point of sale (POS) data across multiple locations, but also required a much more comprehensive view into all operational functions within their business, including payroll, inventory, purchasing, recipes, sales, and labor, to better understand the health of the overall business.

However, manually consolidating reports from across the business took several days to complete. Along with different systems in place for payroll, inventory, and accounts payable, staff had to comprehend non-standard processes and data in multiple geographical locations.

CraftWorks required a turnkey solution for the entire company to access operational information anytime, anywhere. In addition, this solution would have to not only be POS agnostic and easy to install across the current set of legacy systems in the company, but ideally be on one central Web-based platform that could encompass other areas of operations and provide an environment for scale that supports a growing business.

CraftWorks selected Ctuit RADAR to achieve business insight into all of its locations. RADAR provided a comprehensive integrated suite of highly configurable modules, allowing CraftWorks management and staff to easily navigate POS data at a glance, as well as inventory, recipes, and accounts payable information via a series of modular-based intuitive decision support tools.

As the company continues to grow and expand, the implementation of RADAR provides an easy, accessible method for visibility into the entire organization.

All levels of the organization, from executives to the executive chefs, use RADAR to view how the operation is performing.

CraftWorks implemented the base Ctuit RADAR modules along with optional modules including General Sales Ledger (Financial module), Accounts Payable, Inventory, Recipes, and Payroll.

RADAR is designed to provide critical information essential to the needs of CraftWorks. Ctuit extracts the critical data from sales, labor, and accounting that yields key intelligence upon which profitable business decisions are made.

Being POS agnostic, RADAR easily integrated with the variety of POS systems installed at CraftWorks, such as Micros, Aloha, and Positouch.

As the company acquired more stores, RADAR was rolled out effortlessly, immediately gathering business intelligence on the new and existing locations irrespective of the concept under the CraftWorks banner.

RADAR helps to streamline and negate a lot of manual invoice data entry by implementing Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) via multiple vendors. The electronic invoices flow directly into the Accounts Payable module, which rives the cost calculations via their purchases.

Ctuit RADAR offers CraftWorks a Web-based recipe management solution that gives the team detailed insight into theoretical versus actual food costs and how they impact the bottom line.

It now has seamless access to a consolidated and online database containing all recipe ingredients fully integrated with food costs (derived from the purchases in the Accounts Payable module). This ensures both consistent food quality and comprehensive cost management throughout their entire organization.

“The ROI with these cost basis improvements, as well as other general and administrative savings gained by implementing Ctuit, was over 2.5 percent,” says Alex Birnbaum, vice president information technology for CraftWorks.

“In addition, the RADAR solution has a wealth of labor-orientated charts, alerts, dashboards, and reports that have made a significant contribution in terms of effectively managing our labor resources across each concept and locations at a corporate, regional, and restaurant level right across the USA,” Birnbaum says. “The labor savings for CraftWorks have been recognized as 1 percent—which, for an organization our size, is quite considerable.

“CraftWorks needed one solution for reporting, payroll, inventory, recipes, and accounts payable. Anytime you focus on numbers, you can improve your cost basis. RADAR allows us to use our data to make measurable improvements to the bottom line.”