Microsoft Technology Gives Leading German Restaurant Tasty Data to Savor

How popular is Bremen chicken in Munich? Is Alaskan Pollack more popular at lunchtime or in the evening? What is the best selling dessert—rice pudding or Rotegrütze? These questions are very important to NORDSEE, Europe’s biggest fish restaurant chain and the third largest fast-food restaurant in Germany.

Answering them is a job for a sophisticated reporting system that quickly records sales in every one of more than 400 NORDSEE branches in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. More detail in the reports means intranet accuracy in finding reasons for turnover variations, tracking down weak points, and taking well-aimed countermeasures. This is how additional sales opportunities open up—and how each individual NORDSEE branch can see where it stands compared to the others.

From the Counter to the Database

The use of an IT-based reporting system is nothing new for NORDSEE. In Bremerhaven, the company has been using cash data from sales counters since 1993. Additional information about working hours, employee fluctuation, and sickness absence was obtained from the human resources personnel management module. Data about NORDSEE operating costs were derived from SAP systems.

Since 2001, the most important source for NORDSEE managers needing information about sales has been the NORDSEE intranet solution (NIL). This is based on an in-house development linking the cash-till systems at the sales counters to the database in the head office in Bremerhaven. It allows NIL to provide data on sales, customer frequency, and the number of articles per till receipt.

Initially, information from NIL and the data from SAP were processed using the German version of a Version reporting software package. However, this program had reached its limits by February 2002. Data preparation had to be carried out largely by hand, analysis capabilities were small, and licenses proved too costly in the long term. All of this was discovered when the need arose to track down potential areas for optimization in the company. A performance analysis was introduced to enable comparisons between branches of the NORDSEE business.

Too Time-Consuming

Thomas Blaufuss, IT department manager at NORDSEE, says: “Even an employee who was experienced in handling IT systems could produce at most three performance analyses per week.” With around 400 NORDSEE restaurants in Germany, simple arithmetic means this task would take 133 weeks. NORDSEE needed a new reporting system.

New Business Intelligence

The search for an IT service provider for the business intelligence solution did not take long. NORDSEE already had good experience of working with the Bremen system house and Microsoft partner, HEC.

HEC began building the new reporting system, VISS (marketing information and control system), in May 2002. The project was competed in six months. VISS collates all of the Bremerhaven company sales and operational data in a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database.

Every day, when the till receipts have been totaled, up-to-date sales data from each branch is written directly into the NIL database through an ISDN link. Each night the data is transferred automatically into the data warehouse, supplemented with costs information from SAP and processed there for analyses and assessments. The next morning data is available for analysis in the VISS system.

Jürgen Gahler, procurator for HEC, says: “We can now combine the date, location, sales, and region to obtain information such as: On 23 December, the Stachus branch in Munich achieved the highest turnover in Upper Bavaria.”

Information that previously needed search runs taking hours and days in various databases is now available at the push of a button.

Strategic Products in Use

Both VISS and NIL run on the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database. VISS Project Manager, Mirko Adam, says: “SQL Server is NORDSEE’s strategic database product because it is efficient and easy to administer. It is an ideal database solution for a company of our size.”

On top of that, SQL Server 2000 has built-in analysis functions such as online analytical processing (OLAP). This enables decision makers to assess a company’s multi-layered data stocks themselves on a personal computer, where help from database experts was previously required.

Simple Functions, Big Successes

The progress that NORDSEE has achieved by using VISS is enormous. Blaufuss, says: “The regional managers are full of praise. This is because they now have much quicker access to the information they need for training and sales promotion activities.” This might include detailed information about sales, personnel workload, and employees that was available only once a week or even once a month, but now can be called up daily.

The quality of the data is much better with VISS because it combines the various databases into a single, centralized data warehouse. Sales figures can now be related to personnel data from the SAP system, which was previously impossible. Historically, figures from the personnel management department reached the branches with a time delay of several days. Now, each branch manager can see the previous day’s productivity of his team the next morning and compare performance with other NORDSEE branches.

NORDSEE regards the VISS business intelligence solution as a big step forward. All of its branches have now been analyzed once using the performance analysis system. Optimization measures appropriate to each case are now underway. Blaufuss is happy to say that the successes are noticeable.

http://www.microsoft.com/industry/hospitality/businessvalue/nordseearticle.mspx