COMPANY OVERVIEW
CraftWorks Restaurants and Breweries proudly serve the finest craft beer and made-from-scratch creative cuisine.
BUSINESS SITUATION
CraftWorks required a turnkey solution for the entire company to access operational information anytime, anywhere.
KEY RESULTS
Compeat (now R365) provided a comprehensive integrated suite of tools allowing CraftWorks management and staff to easily navigate POS data at a glance as well as Inventory, Recipes, and Accounts Payable information
Background
CraftWorks Restaurants and Breweries (now SPB Hospitality) proudly serve the finest craft beer and made-from-scratch creative cuisine. With nearly 200 restaurants operating under 14 different brands, they employ close to 12,000 people in serving approximately 80,000 guests each day. Their restaurants range from traditional casual dining concepts to fine dining white tablecloth establishments.
Their largest brands include Old Chicago, Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurants, and Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery. With over 70 of the locations featuring fresh brewed beer on-site, they are the world’s leading operator of brewery restaurants.
Challenge
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 their other areas of operations and provide an environment for scale that supports their growing business.
Solution
CraftWorks selected Compeat (now R365) to achieve business insight into all of its locations. Compeat 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 Compeat provides an easy, accessible method for visibility into the entire organization. All levels of the organization from executives to the executive chefs use Compeat to view how the operation is performing.
CraftWorks implemented the base Compeat Radar modules along with optional modules including General Sales Ledger (Financial module), Accounts Payable, Inventory, Recipes, and Payroll. Compeat is designed to provide critical information essential to the needs of CraftWorks. Compeat extracts the critical data from sales, labor, and accounting that yields key intelligence upon which profitable business decisions are made.
Results
Being Point of Sale (POS) agnostic, Compeat easily integrated with the variety of POS systems installed at CraftWorks, such as Micros, Aloha, and Positouch. As the company acquired more stores, Compeat was rolled out effortlessly, immediately gathering business intelligence on the new and existing locations irrespective of the concept under the CraftWorks banner.
Compeat 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 drives the cost calculations via their purchases.
Compeat offers CraftWorks a web-based recipe management solution that gives their team detailed insight into theoretical vs. actual food costs and how they impact the bottom line. Now they have 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 Compeat (now R365) was over 2.5%.” stated Alex Birnbaum, Vice President Information Technology for CraftWorks.
“In addition, the Compeat 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. The labor savings for CraftWorks have been recognized as 1% – which for an organization our size is quite considerable” Birnbaum went on to say.
“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 bottomline.”
“The ROI with these cost basis improvements, as well as other general and administrative savings gained by implementing Compeat (now R365) was over 2.5%.”
– Alex Birnbaum, Vice President Information Technology for CraftWorks.
