Bringing together a wide variety of information in one place can give
pubcos a greater understanding of
their outlets, says Noli Dinkovski
Imagine that you are working at a pubco head office, and you are asked to identify the most profitable outlet. A quick glance at the accounts will easily tell you which one is generating the most revenue. However, your boss then decides to throw a curve ball - he wants you to add floor space and the number of employees of each pub to the equation.
But the information is easy to find if you have invested in software that can pick up all these elements and compile them into a spreadsheet.
This is a scenario put forward by Della Payne, director for change++, supplier of business intelligence software Cognos. "Where in the past you had one reporting system for your EPoS, one for your accounts, and so on, Cognos can actually pull all that information together very quickly to help you find out so much more about your business," she says.
Payne believes that any business with a large product range or customer base needs to be able to store, report, analyse and present the data generated by daily activities easily and accurately. Decision-makers must be able to respond quickly to what the information is telling them. Equally, licensees need to keep an eye on their daily incomings and outgoings. This is where business intelligence software comes in.
Payne's view is shared by Sean Jackson, marketing manager at IT specialist Kognito. "The average pub company will know exactly how many drinks they are selling and how many people they need to hire at certain periods of the day. The real issue comes when the directors start trying to bring the data together - they have a dozen people working in a bar at the same time, yet sales are still poor. Why is that?"
Kognito is currently working with two pub companies, each of around 150 outlets. Reports are provided on a contractual basis every Monday morning to both pubcos and are sent straight through to senior management.
A scalable approach
Jackson claims to be "staggered" by the failure of many pubcos to look at their businesses in a holistic way. "Obviously, the bigger players have these systems in place, but it's the
smaller operators that are perhaps not quite so developed," he says.
Business intelligence is typically scalable - you can dip your toes in the water by linking up a couple of systems first, such as EPoS and payroll, and then add more to it over time.
Zonal's Dimensions business intelligence tool has two versions; one designed for head office and another for individual outlets, so licensees can look at and track everything that goes through their terminals, giving them the ability to look at individual staff and product transactions.
K3 claims to offer business intelligence tools at a variety of levels. Its Jet Reports package is suitable for smaller operations concerned with extracting information from the general ledger.
"If you want to look at EPoS data then you need something more," says business sector manager David Cooke. "For that we have a product called Targit, which gives you the ability to do like-for-like reporting on how products were selling, for instance."
Cooke says that complex reporting requires a "cube" of information to be built overnight for use the next day. "Larger estates require this, otherwise, if you're extracting data on an ongoing basis two people will turn up at a meeting with inconstant information. That has always been a problem with business intelligence."
Cognos works in the same way and its latest version, Cognos8, provides reports that are accessible from a single website, from which users can access different levels of information.
Access to information
"Area managers are able to get hold of reports specific to them, perhaps to see how a certain promotion in one town is faring," says Payne. "The head office will not be so concerned with specifics but will want company-wide data."
With area managers always on the road, however, access to the information may be an issue. "It's always been a problem for the pub industry," says Payne.
"The strategy either needs to be: equip the managers to go online when they're out and about, which is never straightforward; or make sure they are able to pull off the reports at home."
Payne says change++ is there to provide help and support with these dilemmas. "We work very much in partnership with the pubcos. We know what this industry needs, and because we've done it so many times we can help them find the right performance indicators to make their business a success."
How business intelligence helps
l Can link information from different reports together - for example, EPoS and payroll data to create a sales and wages report
l Gives greater detail - for example, from a summary profit-and-loss to detailed trading information at an individual pub
l Allows easy access to reports and data for area managers on the move
l Provides simple-to-use analysis for head-office staff
l Enables timely reporting (can be within the hour) - important when monitoring staff costs against sales or measuring the success of promotions
l Produces "league tables" of best and worst-performing pubs
case study: Mitchells & Butlers
Like many pubcos, Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) has a number of different technology systems installed across its pubs. Until recently, the process of transferring data between several applications and moving it to one place was resource-intensive and time consuming.
This was before M&B took on business intelligence software from Business Objects to access, analyse and share up-to-date information day by day. "The Data Manager package has allowed us to move data four to six times faster," says M&B integration manager Paul Tomkinson.
M&B is planning to use Data Manager's web services to support retail estate management. It can track the value of properties within the portfolio, building a complete picture of each property from one central source.
"The real estate department will then use this to classify outlets, monitor their state of repair, and support rebranding and new outlet decisions," says IT director Stewart Walker.
In all, Business Objects software can report data on M&B's finance, marketing, risk and compliance, human resources and regional management.
There is also a dashboard application, which allows regional managers to monitor company performance and will quickly alert them to problem areas.
"As regional managers take on extra responsibility, it's essential that they can see day-to-day operational performance in each of the outlets they manage," says Tomkinson. "The dashboards give them just that."