Eat 'n Park's Jim Welsh: Serving up technology with operators in mind

Nation's Restaurant News,  May 17, 1999  by Ed Rubinstein

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When asked to identify his hero, Jim Welsh made this immediate response: "my dad, who put out Pittsburgh-area fires for a living."

And growing up in the sports-crazed city, Welsh idolized the late Pirates' slugger Roberto Clemente and Steelers' linebacker Jack Lambert, two athletes who exhibited apostolic loyalty to their franchises.

When Welsh took a job as a line cook at an Eat 'n Park restaurant at the age of 17, he may have doubted his ability to display such allegiance to one employer. Those sentiments, however, have long since become fleeting memories, especially since Welsh earlier this year was promoted to vice president of information services for the Pittsburgh-based family chain--almost 23 years later.

Eat 'n Park's foodservice operations consist of 72 company-owned restaurants in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, which last year generated revenues in excess of $200 million, and two contract foodservice concerns, Parkhurst Dining Services and Cura Hospitality.

After going through Eat 'n Park's management program and spending 10 years in management, including a stint as a general manager at one of the chain's highest-grossing units, Welsh was part of the evaluation team that selected the operator's first computerized point-of-sale system--the NCR 2760. He then was tapped to form Eat 'n Park's MIS group and was named manager of restaurant systems in 1990.

"Before that I never turned on a PC, but I viewed it as an exciting opportunity to start something from the ground up," he recalled. But management wanted someone who knew the restaurants forward and backward and could take operator-driven and service-oriented approaches to managing technology. Who better than someone who has been in operations for 14 years?

Take Eat 'n Park's back-office. Developed and refined on an ongoing basis with Seattle-based systems shop Deterministics Inc., the robust platform consists of a series of modules that are totally integrated with point-of-sale. Among them: cash management, time clocks that extract point-of-sale data into a spooled files and daily P&Ls. The platform uses database software and querying tools from Oracle, version 6.0, and is installed on the same PC that operates the POS. A corporate version of the system is hosted on an IBM RS/6000 midrange computer.

Elaborating on one module, Welsh stated that TAM, an acronym for transaction analysis module, gives "store-level managers and corporate executives access to detailed transaction data." For example, end-users can drill down to scan specific transaction data by table, server and daypart and set up reports to gauge product movement and menu mix. That in turn helps them better prepare for product needs and uses.

Tying those processes together, Welsh touted the benefits that have been realized from a purchasing module that lets managers place orders electronically, either to Eat 'n Park's centralized distribution hub or to Parkway Food Services of Greensburg, Pa.

Welsh discussed several projects now underway to ensure that Eat 'n Park's systems won't shift into park on Jan. 1, 2000. His team now is working to upgrade its J.D. Edwards accounting and payroll system, to version 7.3 from 5.2 which cuts about 8,000 checks every two weeks and runs on an IBM AS/400. Welsh said that will be completed by August of this year.

Another initiative that's winding down involved software updates to the NCR point-of-sale registers, including some Oracle programming conversions that were handled by Deterministics.

Eat 'n Park pondered a complete POS overhaul, but after it weighed the costs and benefits of upgrading vs. updating, it chose to take the latter avenue. "We've gotten a lot of mileage out of the 2760s. There was a stronger business case to make the DOS-based system Y2K-compliant," Welsh explained.

With an eye toward the future, two Eat 'n Park locations now are testing the 3700 platform from MICROS Systems Inc. "We really want to take advantage of touch-screens and Windows-based technologies," Welsh said. He predicted that the 3700 test would be expanded to six restaurants by the fall.

Though Welsh has been ensconced in Eat 'n Park's MIS department for almost a decade, he said he has managed to avoid "the techie label." He added that it's been challenging at times to get some employees to view MIS as a department that's "here for you rather than just a necessary evil run by a bunch of 'techies.' We're getting there."

One move that has helped was the formation of an "IS executive steering committee," a group that includes Welsh, chairman and chief executive Jim Broadhurst; restaurant division president and chief operating officer Basil Cox; Dan Wilson, president of the Parkhurst Dining division; and chief financial officer David Wohleber, to whom he reports.

Along the way, Welsh has formed what he called a "solid team" of 11 staffers, which include several other long-tenured employees like director of corporate technology Jim Schaefer, a 19-year Eat 'n Park veteran, and manager of point-of-sale technology Rick Marshall, who joined the operator in 1986.