Waterloo Holdings restaurants and pubs operate during all day parts from breakfast time at Jimmy’s Eggs to happy hour at the Bricktown Brewery or late night snacks and a cold beer at Henry Hudson’s Pub. In between they serve thousands of guests daily at S&B Burgers and Old Chicago. They are dedicated to providing the best value to their guests in every category they operate in with the goal of making sure all of their guests enjoy the time they spend at their restaurants.
Business Challenges
With their aggressive growth and the acquisition of Charlie Browns and Texas Steakhouse, Waterloo Holdings needed a solution to provide critical operational data and centralize information to make quicker decisions. Recipes, food costs, labor, and accounting were a struggle to track on Excel spreadsheets, and Waterloo Holdings wanted a solution to provide detailed tracking for all of the financial aspects of the group. Store level employees, managers, and home office executives all needed access to daily reports.
The Solution
Waterloo Holdings realized they needed one fully integrated system to handle all of the company-owned and franchisees’ operational and financial needs. They selected Ctuit RADAR for insight and control for their restaurant business and consolidated reporting across 11 concepts and 85 locations. Ctuit RADAR provided their comprehensive solution to manage all of the operational requirements in a simple, easy-to-use format.
Rather than going to the Ctuit site, Waterloo Holdings Managers and Executives have the option of receiving daily export batches via email that automatically show up in their in- box, making it easy to access and evaluate the reports and Ops statement. Accessing their relevant data via their smartphone and tablet devices also provides the flexibility of easy access which streamlines and enhances time management.
The Results
Ctuit worked closely with Charlie Browns to create a specialized custom report to track the reaction to the daily sales plan. With this RADAR report, Charlie Browns could determine if their sales were going higher or lower than their forecasted sales. If a location was going out of the specified parameters, Management could fix the problem immediately. Working with Ctuit, Charlie Browns shaved off 1 percent of their labor costs.
Additionally, with menu engineering and streamlining inventory, Charlie Browns was also able to achieve a better plate cost, reducing their food costs by 0.75 percent.
In Garfield’s multi-unit concept, Management uses the manual labor program to react to sales and make instant decisions, thus streamlining the workflow and optimizing their success. Using forecasting, Garfield’s has saved 0.5 percent of hourly labor dollars spent, a vital impact to their bottom line.
Garcia’s has realized significant savings by shaving significant management labor. By running reports anytime and anywhere and accessing reports in the cloud, Managers can effectively manage remotely without being present in the restaurant and affecting guests. The time saved has allowed Garcia’s to enhance their operational piece, also saving 0.5 percent of hourly labor dollars spent.
