Name: Michael R. Everett
Title: vice president, information services, Frisch's Restaurants Inc., Cincinnati
Birth date: June 23, 1954
Education: master of business administration and bachelor of science, systems science, University of West Florida; bachelor of science, accounting, Indiana University
Career: joined Frisch's in 2004 after serving the company for three years as an employee of Haverstick Consulting; previously worked for consulting firm Whittman Hart
Manages: 14 employees
Reports to: Craig Maier, chief executive
Family: wife, Sherri, and daughters, Angela Morgan and Jamie Schutte
POS system: Xpient IRIS/SMART running on IBM 4846-545 SurePOS terminals
Unit-level, back-office application: Menulink, with ongoing migration to Xpient Back Office
Enterprise accounting and human resources management: Lawson 8.03 for financials, benefits and payroll, procurement, manufacturing, inventory activities, franchise and lease management
During his years as a restaurant consultant, Michael Everett said he often worked with information technology, or IT, professionals who didn't take the time to fully understand a problematic business process before prescribing a hardware or software fix.
Everett said he would counsel such clients to avoid or delay technology initiatives until after they comprehended all the possible remedies for the outdated or broken process, including those that had nothing to do with information systems. He added that he lives by his own advice these days as vice president of information services at Cincinnati-based Frisch's Restaurants Inc., which operates 35 licensed Golden Corral restaurants and 90 Big Boy locations, while franchising 10 other Big Boy units to others.
"Most IT people want to identify the technology and then search for a business problem, which makes it extremely difficult to 'sell' the project to upper management," Everett said. "But once you identify the business issue, the technology becomes much easier to identify and the business case is already known."
What were some of Frisch's recently completed IT projects?
Frisch's new Web-based applications include electronic signature capture and monitoring for employee forms; electronic tip verification [that enables employees to electronically sign for tip payouts]; financial report storage and viewing; exception reporting; daily store performance reporting; employee evaluation; employee sales performance; guest check review [to identify any check open past a specific allotted time]; store ordering [generates automatic replenishment quantity suggestions, based on forecast and product mix]; and truck receiving and scheduling.
What's on the IT drawing board?
We're continuing to develop applications for assisting executive managers with their analytical duties [related to] drive-thru performance, inventory control [and] labor scheduling. We're also working on solutions to provide operations management with the most up-to-date store performance information, identify exception conditions in a near real-time manner that allows management to make timely adjustments and [further reduce] paper [usage] throughout the company.
Why has the restaurant industry lagged behind other verticals in terms of IT implementation?
The easy explanation is tight margins, but the real culprit is the inability of IT departments to identify solutions that actually drive bottom-line performance. We tend to take solutions from other industries and force-fit them into the restaurant industry without understanding their real impact on the operation. For example, a technology that might drive bottom-line improvements at Wal-Mart — like RFID [or radio frequency identification systems for inventory control and product movement analysis] — won't [produce sufficient results to] cover the cost of deployment in a restaurant company.
Is there really such a thing as a "killer app?"
In reality, it's a pipe dream. I equate this "killer app" mentality with that of the baseball player who goes up to the plate searching for the "home run" pitch. Rather than focusing on the single, he always swings for the fence when the bases are loaded. Every once in a while, he'll hit the grand slam, but far more frequently he'll strike out. If we [IT professionals] only focused our energy on the singles — improving processes through optimization, training resources and implementing the right tools — our batting averages would rise significantly and we would command a higher level of respect from within the organization.
What was the most challenging type of IT project you've encountered, and how did you handle it?
Implementing an enterprise resource planning, or ERP, system has to be the most difficult project in IT. As a consultant, I always asked customers whether they wanted to deploy an ERP solution or change their processes. If they said "implement an ERP solution," I knew we were doomed from the start. But if they talked about changing their processes, there was hope. In implementing an ERP solution at Frisch's, we mapped all of the existing processes in their "as is" state and then re-mapped them in a "to be" state, after each process was reviewed for waste, streamlining, consolidation, or automation.
How can restaurant IT executives sell technology to reluctant decision-makers?
It's fairly straightforward if you have been trained properly. First, identify their business issues. Second, re-design the process by eliminating the observed issues. Third, plug your technical solution into the re-mapped process. Fourth, calculate the impact of the re-designed process on the operation. This last piece will require someone to know the value of the business impact. [For example, knowing that] 20 seconds off the drive-thru time equals "X" amount of dollars in increased sales. With a $1 million sales increase, a $500,000 IT project suddenly seems cheap. Conversely, a $1 million project with no identifiable business impact seems really expensive.
What strategies can IT executives use to help end-users within the restaurant organization — whether at the store or corporate level — transition to new technology?
Understand a principle Craig Maier, our CEO, figured out long ago. That is, while store operators have the unique ability to manage all of the challenges that exist within a store, and IT personnel have the unique ability to create technical solutions for just about any problem, most IT people fail miserably when it comes to developing a solution that can be effectively executed by a non-IT person. The secret is this: Store operators weren't hired to become computer professionals. Don't create a solution that requires them to do so.
