Background
Long before they struck their first match, lit their brick oven, and welcomed their first guest, there stood a vision for a high-energy restaurant with delicious food and drinks that would come to be known for bringing people together.
In 2002 Matchbox found an old vacant building in the heart of Washington DC and outlined a set of core beliefs that would be the first step in bringing their vision to life. The rest is history.
Challenge
Before implementing Compeat (nowR365), Matchbox relied on Quickbooks to manage their accounting, and spreadsheets to manage all of their back-office operations. Consequently, they spent many hours every day entering data into spreadsheets at each restaurant with no easy way to centralize this information. Information from the spreadsheets had to also be reentered into Quickbooks. In summary, data entry was tedious, information was not timely, and the accuracy of the information was not controllable.
Solution
In 2007, a new General Manager who had prior experience with Compeat suggested they implement Compeat software to simplify the management of their growing concepts. Matchbox replaced Quickbooks and their spreadsheets with Compeat and have been reaping in the benefits ever since. Brian
Anderson, Operating Systems Manager for Matchbox, could not be more pleased with their success. “Managing multiple entities (restaurants and companies) would be next to impossible without Compeat,” states Anderson.]
Results
Anderson is very impressed with the labor savings they have been able to achieve by handling their vendor invoices more efficiently with Compeat (now R365). Matchbox now automatically imports their invoices from multiple vendors. Sysco, one of their largest vendors who make at least 3 deliveries per week per store, generally has a five to six page invoice that each manager had to work through, usually taking at least an hour of their time per delivery. Now, this process is automated.
Anderson also likes Compeat’s central office consolidation of his stores. This centralized processing combined with better invoice handling at his restaurants has saved them 8-10 hours of management labor per week, per store. “Along with the labor cost savings, managers have more time to spend in the front of the house supporting our staff and mingling with customers to ensure they’re having a spectacular dining experience,” states Anderson.Matchbox also is impressed with the reduction in food costs. They opened their first quick-service concept, DC-3, in 2010. Although DC-3 had an extremely popular opening, they soon discovered that their costs were too high and that changes were needed to optimize their success. Anderson was assigned the task to correct the problem and turned to his Compeat system.
Anderson used Compeat to verify the accuracy of all of his prep and menu item recipes. He next compared theoretical and actual cost variances. Anderson then ran a menu engineering report that ranks each menu item based on its contribution to the bottom line. These steps enabled Anderson to isolate problems and make positive changes to increase DC-3’s bottom line. “By reengineering our menu with Compeat, we were able to reduce our food cost by 2%!” raves Anderson.
Anderson was also able to use the menu engineering report to re-structure the entire bar and liquor programing for the Matchbox. “The Menu Engineering report in Compeat proved to be invaluable in this project. It gave us the opportunity to look at profitability projections using historic sales mix data with new menu item pricing.”
