Your hospitality business generates a lot of data. Captured within your business systems - POS, loyalty, finance, staff and inventory - is a mine of valuable information. Information about your costs, your revenue, your profits (or losses), your ingredients, your suppliers, your staff, your customers, your busy and quiet times, your special offers and campaigns - the list is extensive.
Some venues don’t realise how very valuable this information is - it stays locked away in the depths of their systems while they keep on doing what they’ve always done and hoping for the best.
By making this data available in easily accessible formats, you can turn it into business intelligence - information that helps you make more informed business decisions. Information that can make the difference between profit and loss, planning and hit-or-miss, efficiency and disorganisation.
There are many ways business intelligence can help you make better decisions - here’s our top picks:
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Costs - having a true picture of your costs is, of course, essential to making a profit. Some costs are relatively straightforward and visible. Others can easily be overlooked. Business intelligence gives you the full picture - for example, the cost of recipe ingredients, staff, building overheads (like rent, power and rates), support (your bookkeeper or bank fees for example). Armed with a complete cost picture, you can see where to trim expense, or whether you need to adjust your pricing to remain profitable.
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Customer insights - the more you know about your customers, the better you can serve them. If you understand how frequently they visit, how they use their loyalty points, when and what they order online, you can make business decisions that offer more of what they love. Good business information helps you to ‘read your customer’s mind’ - and if they feel that you understand them, their loyalty - and spend - increases.
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Staffing levels - customers hate slow service in an understaffed venue, but you don’t want team members twiddling their thumbs on a quiet day. By analysing patterns of your busiest and quietest times, being able to take into account external factors, such as weather or a local event, you’ll be able to plan the right number of staff for each service.
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Stockroom levels - these can also be a balancing act. You don’t want to be tying up cash by buying supplies before you need them, but you certainly don’t want to be running out of key ingredients and having to remove dishes from the menu. Real-time visibility of your stock levels, combined with data on which dishes are being sold, will enable you to place replenishment orders at exactly the right time to keep your storeroom full but not overflowing.
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Menus - for restaurants, regular changes to your menu are essential to keep guests interested, but how do you know when to take something off and which are the evergreen dishes you need to keep? Detailed sales information about what dishes are selling best (perhaps tied in with time of year, or weather data) will help you pinpoint exactly when and what to change.
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Shrinkage - a reality in most hospitality businesses, shrinkage has several causes, from inefficient recipe management, to overstocking, to staff pilfering. Business intelligence helps you not only to identify shrinkage, but to dig into the underlying cause, and to put in place actions to minimise it.
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Trends - when you’re dealing in the day to day detail of a business, it can be hard to step back and see the bigger picture. Trend information gives you the longer view of your business that is essential for strategic planning. For example, if you can see prices from certain suppliers creeping up, you could use that information to review your supply chain or negotiate your next contract. Trend information will show you how you are performing compared to the same time last year, or from week to week. This will help you spot potential issues early. Then you can dig down into your data to find the underlying issue and decide on actions to get back on track.
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Transaction size - one of the most popular ways to grow revenue is to generate more income from the same number of customers. But you can only do this if you know your average transaction size, and what each customer is buying in that transaction. Intelligence about your transaction size, and whether it is going up or down, will help you build effective campaigns to increase it.
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Campaign results - many hospitality venues run specials, campaigns, events - all aimed at increasing visitors and spend. However, no campaign is worthwhile if it costs more than it generates. With detailed business intelligence information, you can track all the costs, the profile of your business beforehand and the results of the campaign to confirm that are actually driving increased business.
A Business Intelligence dashboard will show you high level information at a glance, with the opportunity to drill down when you spot exceptions. It will give you real-time information for real-time action, but will also show you trends over time for strategic planning. It will be accessible via mobile for decisions on the go.
Business intelligence is your most valuable business tool - providing a window into every aspect of your business, and supporting better business decisions.
