eCapital Advisors Case Study: McCormick & Schmick's
About McCormick & Schmick’s
McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurants, Inc. is a leading national seafood restaurant operator in the affordable upscale dining segment. Over the past 35 years, they have successfully grown their business by focusing on serving a broad selection of fresh seafood. With nearly 100 locations in the US and Canada, McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurants focus on providing guests with an unparalleled dining experience and tailoring the freshest seafood selections available to local and regional tastes. In the highly competitive restaurant market, McCormick & Schmick’s needed to understand and respond to dining trends in real time.?
Challenges Faced
The challenge for McCormick & Schmick’s was even though the stores shared a consistent restaurant model, they operated as autonomous entities with individual and daily changing menus. It was extremely difficult to compare and understand current and historical sales as well as other key business drivers. Their previous method for business analysis required gathering data from disparate systems and consolidating it into a 70-page Microsoft™ Excel document.
Strategy Followed
Within 30 days, IBM® partner eCapital implemented IBM Cognos® Express to create a set of automated dashboards that integrated both GL and POS data from each store. Every night data from the POS systems automatically update management dashboards allowing key personnel to quickly analyze current and historical data at an enterprise and store level. It also provides drill-down visibility into daily restaurant sales, traffic patterns and expenses. ?
Benefits Realised
This visibility is allowing McCormick & Schmick’s executives, as well as individual general managers, to quickly recognize trends to key business drivers and give them the information they need to make the most informed decisions about their business on a daily basis. The migration of sales reporting to IBM Cognos Express produces both efficiency and reliability of the data distributed by finance. The automation of this task has freed 40 analyst work hours a month—time that is now used to concentrate on analysis rather than spreadsheet maintenance.
KEY BENEFITS?
- Ease and speed of implementation meant users were creating reports and using dashboards within just one month.
- The powerful IBM Cognos Express OLAP analytical engine allowed McCormick & Schmick’s to integrate and consolidate general ledger and point-of-sale (POS) data.
- Better visibility helps executives and store managers quickly recognize and act upon key business trends.??
About eCapital Advisors
eCapital Advisors, 2010 IBM Cognos North American Partner of the Year, providing Business Analytics consulting. We apply our expertise in Finance, Technology, and Project Management to your business and processes. We listen to your needs, study how your company works, and create solutions customized to match your business. Expertise, flexibility, and results you can count on.
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