|
 |
About Panda Restaurant Group
 If you visit a food court in virtually any mall in the US, you cannot miss the bright red logo featuring the image of a loveable panda. Panda Restaurant Group, Inc. (PRG) is the largest Chinese food service provider in the nation with annual sales of over $750 million and more than 800 restaurant locations – and growing. Based in Rosemead, CA, they dramatically outperform their competitors. Same-store sales have increased every year since 1996 and have become the industry's benchmark of growth.
PRG employs a team of more than 13,000 people who manage its successful concepts throughout 37 US states, Puerto Rico and Japan. Panda Express is the growth engine of Panda Restaurant Group, serving gourmet Chinese food, quickly and conveniently.
The Challenge
The competitive spirit that drives their growth also led PRG to search for a reporting solution that could provide a view of what they call the "health" of each of its restaurant locations. PRG needed a reporting solution that could relay information about each of the stores back to the PRG Headquarters for review, analysis and action, if needed, to improve operations.
According to Caleb Mitsvotai, PRG’s Executive Director of IS Development, the company was looking for a solution that was
- Web-based to make it easy to collect and publish data nationwide
- Easy-to-use by managers who are very skilled in their discipline, but not necessarily technically savvy
A Dashboarding feature for monitoring of key performance measures was also a key criterion.
"We wanted to take an iterative approach with this project which made Logi Info the winning choice. We reviewed proposals from larger Business Intelligence vendors but they all had the barrier of high up front costs. This would have required PRG to pay for a system before fully understanding whether the project would meet our objectives," notes Mitsvotai. "PRG is a very value-oriented company – we need to know what we are buying and the payback timetable – in our restaurants, in our hotels and in our IS purchases. When you are opening 165 new stores in a 12-month period, the risk was too high to make a mistake."
The Solution
"LogiXML’s Logi Info offered a low initial investment cost while meeting our key criteria. The ease of deployment meant we could start with a working system with limited functionality, prove it would work in the real world, and then easily add more features as the business team recognized the value of the reports," added Mitsvotai.
Senior Business Process Engineer, Hoang Nguyen, who was responsible for implementation, said, "We were able to move very quickly because the Logi elemental development process was very straightforward to learn, and the LogiXML example applications helped us visualize the system. And, while being Web-based and working well with SQL Server were key factors in our choice, dashboarding has had the greatest impact. We needed to make it very easy for the managers out in the field to recognize the value of the data to their everyday operations."
The Results
The PRG Dashboard does exactly that, providing an up-to-date view of key measures like Sales, Cost of Goods, Staff Turnover as well as the status of a range of Food Safety Standards that are critical to the success of each restaurant. By viewing the dashboard, managers know exactly where they stand in accordance with expectations and with their peers and can take action accordingly.
With the Logi Info application proceeding well, PRG has now also added an Logi Ad Hoc Report Builder implementation for its managers at headquarters to build custom reports from the data generated from the restaurants.
|
|
|