Restaurant Moneyball

Timothy used to be struggling at work. He’s a waiter at the Landmarc restaurant at the Time Warner Center, a classy-but-accessible eatery that serves bistro fare to Manhattan shoppers. By some measures Timothy has always been a great worker — he clocks in on time and never forgets an order. But his sales of beverages and side dishes were falling short last year.

In one month, Timothy (not his real name) served 426 customers, pulling in $17,991.50 in gross sales with a per-check average of $42.23. That’s $3.84 below the overall per-check average at the Landmarc. It turns out that while Timothy was beating the rest of the waitstaff in add-on sales like bacon or cheese on a burger, he was lagging 2 percent behind everybody else in red wine and liquor sales, and a whopping 14 percent behind his peers in sides like French fries and creamed spinach.

The bottom line was $1,636 of lost sales opportunity in a month — the money Timothy would have made if he’d hit the server average.

We know all this because every item sold at Landmarc — down to the last malbec, martini and red quinoa pilaf — is individually logged and enumerated by a sophisticated software package called Slingshot. The software slices, dices and crunches the data every night, and then serves it to managers with breakfast the next morning.

So when Timothy was up for a performance review last summer, the restaurant’s general manager knew everything about him — information she incorporated into a heart-to-heart talk about improving his average.
Some of the nation’s top eateries are quietly embracing data mining to eke out profit in a tough economy.

“It used to be that a manager would say, ‘That server’s great! He’s a nice guy, he shows up on time and keeps the salt shakers full,’” says Damian Mogavero, the entrepreneur behind Slingshot. “Now they can tell a server, ‘You sell 40 percent less red wine than your peers and you work in a steakhouse!’”

Welcome to the data-driven, number-crunching future of restauranteering. With the food business thriving again in the midst of America’s economic upswing – consistently claiming a whopping 4 percent of GDP — some of the nation’s top eateries are quietly embracing data mining to eke out profit in a tough economy. Software systems like Compeat, Hotschedules and Eatec help restaurants track complex metrics like sales trends, employee overtime, and food orders from suppliers.

by Joe Ray, Wired |  Read more:
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