Tumbleweed Southwest Grill of Louisville, Ky., and Cafe Rio Mexican Grill of Salt Lake City both claimed reduced losses using above-store reporting and exception-based restaurant management software and services from Mirus Restaurant Solutions.
The subscription-based service from Houston-based Mirus, which can analyze data down to restaurant-transaction level, helped Tumbleweed realize $300,000 in sales that might otherwise have been lost, according to officials of the chain, which boasts 52 units in the United States and 13 overseas. It did that by analyzing the ratio of soft drink orders to entrée orders, allowing the chain to spot and end apparent incidences of employees providing free soft drinks, they said.
"The exception [spotting and reporting] capability enables us to see which servers ring in water in place of other beverages from all levels of our organization," said Steve Brooks, director of mission control for Tumbleweed-parent Tumbleweed Restaurants Inc. "Soft beverage sales are up more than 6 percent since the start of this exception [reporting service]."
Cafe Rio officials said the Mirus technology automating multiunit data collection and exception-based reporting improved monitoring and administration of policies tied to frequent diner, employee feeding and manager complimentary meals programs.
"With Mirus, we now have the discount data readily available and easy to analyze, enabling us to see exactly where we needed to improve our discount policy," said Bob Baker, Cafe Rio's chief financial officer. "Mirus tools helped us find one margin point of [profit] improvement."