Specialist business intelligence solutions provider Synergy Computing has taken Nando's existing data warehouse and fine-tuned it to deliver improved functionality and enhanced business performance to the renowned peri-peri flame grilled chicken empire.
From its 1987 roots in a restaurant in Rosettenville, south of Johannesburg, Nando's has grown to a worldwide phenomenon, with outlets in five continents and over 30 countries around the world. The company's unmitigated success is the result of a dedication to providing healthy food of the highest quality, service excellence and the use of available tools to ensure optimal business performance.
According to Errol Epstein, chief technology officer at Nando's head office in Johannesburg, the company views technology as playing a supportive role in equipping it to deliver on its mission of providing excellent service in its restaurants. "The 'Nando's experience' is about great food and great people rather than technology," he says.
"However, we do use IT to our best advantage to enable us to manage stores effectively - as such, our systems plays a big role in terms of measuring performance by monitoring key drivers," he continues.
Epstein says the company established a data warehouse some three years ago. "We opted for the data warehouse solution as we found we were waiting too long to get trading results from the previous month, a problem that was exacerbated by the rapid growth of the Nando's franchise. We engaged with a recognised business intelligence solution provider to create the data warehouse - but were disappointed when that company delivered what they believed we needed, rather than what we were looking for in reality," he says.
With insufficient structure to the business processes governing data entry into the data warehouse, a further issue cropped up relating to data integrity. Poor data quality resulted from operational realities - over 190 stores must submit their sales data at close of business every evening, which is loaded into the data warehouse. However, it was not an uncommon occurrence for store managers at any one of these locations to fail to submit their report - resulting in missing data. And if the information was submitted the following day, it would not solve the issue as the figures for any given day would be skewed.
As a result, Nando's was saddled with a data warehouse that had questionable data integrity, while insufficient user training had been provided, leaving the company heavily reliant on the technology partner to get any form of value from the implementation.
"Basically we were unable to generate reports with any accuracy - once the input data can't be relied upon, trend reporting goes for a ball of chalk. We ended up producing an Excel spreadsheet instead with an employee spending 4 hours a day entering data from the stores and mailing a 3 megabyte file to 20 senior executives to give them the necessary insight into business operations. Clearly this was a cumbersome, time- and bandwidth consuming exercise that had the additional effect of slowing the mail server," explains Epstein.
He says it was the persistence of Brent Aitken, an account manager at Synergy Computing, led the company to revive the data warehouse project, which had all but fallen into disuse owing to the issues around usability and data quality. "We engaged with Synergy to see what could be done to salvage the project. Its mandate was to clean up the data quality, restructure the data warehouse to ensure information would be correctly and accurately entered, and provide appropriate user training to ensure that value would result from the solution," he says.
As a recognised leader in providing solutions on the Cognos platform - upon which Nando's data warehouse is based - Synergy Computing also offers user training as an integral component of the technology it provides. Explains Aitken: "Real value can only be realised from technology when the users are empowered to take advantage of the functionality it introduces. As such, we believe in leveraging our training capability to provide knowledge transfer in addition to deploying solutions according to best practices."
In a project taking a little over a month, Epstein says Synergy has effectively turned a failed endeavour into a project that looks likely to deliver significant value. "Synergy stepped in and basically restarted the project from scratch. It established key performance indicators, processes to ensure data integrity and attended to the transfer of skills transfer - as well as rebuilding the data warehouse completely," he says.
As a result of Synergy's intervention, Nando's now benefits from accurate and timeous reporting which is accessible to board members wherever they may be internationally. "By using the Web-based Cognos Powerplay reporting tool, executives can access reports remotely, while they are also able to create custom reports which relate to their job function - such as marketing or financial - or by region. We're impressed with the flexibility of the reporting that has been delivered by the redesigned solution," says Epstein.
He adds that the organisation has improved the management of the solution by employing a dedicated data warehouse administrator, and that Synergy is working to provide full knowledge transfer to grow the skills necessary to gain maximum value from its investment.
While the data warehouse presently consolidates information from around South Africa, Epstein says plans are afoot to gather data from Nando's stores around the world. "While it is still fairly early days, our faith in the data warehouse project has been restored. As such, we have further plans afoot to leverage the information contained in it such as producing more detailed marketing reports on product mix and promotion tracking. We definitely see value in analysis and reporting, and will be using Cognos as the standard reporting platform as it can easily create ad hoc as well as standard reports. Ultimately, we envisage taking intelligence to a pretty granular level, with a dashboard for every store containing relevant information that area managers can view immediately, and then extrapolate to get an accurate picture of their regions," he concludes.
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