QSR Maximizes Franchise Performance Using BI Visualizations

The field team at this quick-serve restaurant (QSR) regularly conducts business evaluations across its franchise locations to assess the performance of sales, marketing, and operational activities. Through these evaluations, they wanted to promptly identify issues early on and guide their franchises toward achieving peak growth and profitability. However, using manual slide decks and Excel sheets for evaluating business performance made these regular business evaluations time-consuming and left lots of room for individual variations.

Lack of a standardized process for business reviews and utilization of disparate reporting structures across field teams resulted in redundancy and complicated the automation of slide deck creation. The company engaged Wavicle’s team due to their deep QSR industry experience to develop consistent, easy-to-use visualizations in Tableau that could be integrated into their CRM application to streamline the franchise reporting process. They wanted to optimize data utilization, enabling real-time business reviews that empower informed decision-making, optimize operations, enhance strategic planning, uncover consumer insights, improve employee retention, and ensure strong financial health.

With Wavicle’s help, this major QSR saved an estimated $2.88 million per year in labor costs alone through more efficient reporting for their franchise locations.

Field team struggles with reporting challenges

On a weekly basis, the QSR’s field team provided performance updates and insights to each franchise location, gathering data snapshots from departments, including finance, sales, and marketing, and combining them into PowerPoint presentations.

This process of manually gathering data proved to be challenging and time-consuming. Moreover, the redundant reporting structures across company departments and the lack of consistent data increased the workloads of the field teams.

The fragmented reporting environment hampered the company’s capacity to extract valuable insights to refine business budgets and identify opportunities to boost business performance. To address these challenges, the QSR reached out to Wavicle’s business intelligence experts to improve and enhance their reporting process to create more efficient, standardized business reviews and reduce manual reporting burdens. Given the numerous critical business factors in play, they placed a high priority on completing the project within a timeframe of just six months.

Unlocking new potential with streamlined reporting

Wavicle’s experts worked with the company’s franchise success implementation team to scope clear requirements for the new embedded dashboards, uncovering their dashboard preferences and defining necessary metrics and KPIs. Considering the significant impact of the dashboard’s user interface (UI), Wavicle’s UI/UX experts designed multiple prototypes, carefully crafted for usability and customized to meet their specific requirements.

After securing the team’s approval of the prototypes, Wavicle’s developers built customized Tableau dashboards that fit the franchise success implementation team’s needs. Sourcing data from Amazon Redshift via complex custom SQL scripts, the Wavicle team streamlined reporting by aggregating KPIs from multiple departments, introducing filters for intuitive navigation, and visualizing in Tableau.

The team then established a uniform method for business review reporting by categorizing requirements from different subject areas covering digital sales, operational analytics, and marketing analytics. To enhance the pace of user education, Wavicle’s consultants also created a brief guide tailored for business users, offering instructions on navigating the dashboards and highlighting the value of the new reporting system. Furthermore, Wavicle rebuilt their existing reports in Tableau to improve franchise success storytelling.

Wavicle’s business intelligence experts delivered a customized dashboard with flexible data granularity, empowering the QSR to make informed decisions to address critical business areas such as guest experience, restaurant excellence, and brand standard metrics.

Fueling business growth through transparent franchise-level insights

Wavicle’s BI experts delivered complex franchise analytics for this QSR on an accelerated timeline of just six months, providing value to the company’s field team. With streamlined and insightful dashboards at the field team’s fingertips, the QSR’s franchise success implementation team experienced a 75% reduction in the manual time spent creating business reports, which resulted in a cost savings of roughly $2.88 million. Rapid access to data across multiple levels of data granularity significantly influenced the decision-making process. Examining monthly P&Ls of comparable restaurants was pivotal in identifying opportunities for implementing a new mobile platform.

The dashboards also proved instrumental in creating captivating narratives about restaurant profitability, enabling proactive planning, and strengthening financial resilience. The seamless comparison of restaurant performance against national and regional benchmarks guided strategic decisions and highlighted areas for improvement.

Furthermore, the field team can now easily identify staffing strategies to enhance underperforming service areas and identify restaurants with low retention rates to implement effective employee retention strategies.

Wavicle’s deep analytics and visualization expertise and extensive QSR industry experience helped this organization get detailed insights into individual restaurants’ performance on multiple fronts and acted as a catalyst for strategic initiatives, propelling the business toward sustained growth and prosperity.