Tattershall Castle Group (TCG) has implemented a
singledatabase systemfor the 155 pubs and
bars it runs across the UK to improve profitability usingbusiness intelligence.
"We knew there were inefficiencies in our business, but had no
way of identifying them because we had no visibility of key
performance indicators," said Robert George, finance director at
TCG.
It was important for companies to understand customer profiles
and spending habits to increase profits, he said.
The
WX2 database system from Kognitio combines data from TCG's
electronic till points with data from the company's payroll, stock
and purchasing systems to enable managers to analyse data using the
Cognos 8 business intelligence tool.
"Taking business intelligence beyond electronic till data is new
to the hospitality sector, but we could not have gone to a business
intelligence shop and plugged in a tool without Kognitio's help in
bringing the data sources together and helping us to identify what
information we needed to run the business," said George.
The first phase of the project enabled TCG to compare the cost
of labour with the sales for any given hour to ensure staff levels
were always appropriate to demand.
"The cost of the first phase of the implementation was covered
within two weeks by reducing the cost of labour as a percentage of
profit by up to 1%," said George.
The second phase of the project is aimed at showing how
profitable businesses are each hour and will provide a clear
indication if promotions are successful or not.
"All this was done on intuition in the past, but in future we
will be able to do it tactically based on real performance
measurements," said George.
The Kognitio system, said George, also provided TCG with a
single view of information across the organisation in contrast with
the wide range of data sets, tools and ad-hoc analytical methods
used in the past to produce inconsistent results.