New York group wields data 'Slingshot' to competitive advantage

Nation's Restaurant News,  May 27, 2002  by Alan J. Liddle

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

NEW YORK -- With four Manhattan restaurants and a fifth in development, Main Street Restaurant Partners is only too aware of the need to control costs while providing high levels of customer service as this city rebounds from the recession and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Along those lines MSRP is using an in-store and above-store Web-based reporting system called Slingshot from Avero Inc. It retrieves and organizes transaction data, allowing operators a means by which to uncover inefficiencies and improve service.

"Anything we can do to separate ourselves from the restaurants we compete against is very valuable," noted Spencer Rothschild, a partner in MSRP.

MSRP employs about 350 people to operate two Pan Asian-cuisine Rain restaurants, an American concept called Union Pacific and Calle Ocho, a Pan Latino eatery Its existing restaurants generate annual sales ranging from $4 million to $6 million each from average checks of $35 to $45 at all but Union Pacific, where the typical tab runs much higher, Rothschild said. He reported that the company's newest venue, 300-seat French-American Django, is scheduled to open in late May.

Founded in 1999 and formerly known as RestaurantTrade.com, New York-based Avero, with a Web site at www.averoinc.com, is a business intelligence and data-services provider targeting independent and multiunit restaurants. Avero remotely polls data from POS systems at single or multiple restaurant sites, normalizes, warehouses and analyzes the information and turns out a variety of Web-accessible reports, including those tied to sales and revenues, costs, staff performance and check details.

Rothschild said MSRP's private-party business benefits from the follow-up marketing made possible by Slingshot's ability to drill down through individual order tickets. He added that a morning-after scan of a private party check might reveal that the host should be sent a gift for having ordered a significant amount of wine or that an apology was in order because someone at the restaurant forgot to deduct the deposit from the final bill.

"People usually catch that when they look at their credit card slip again or when their [credit card] statement comes," Rothschild said, explaining how the rare deposit problem often comes to the attention of a private-party host. "Think of how much more impressive it is if you can apologize and take care of it before the guest even realizes there is a problem."

Among other things, Rothschild said, he uses Slingshot "for an accounting perspective and budgeting, for [management of] house accounts, credit card information and cash-on-hand reporting." He added, "In the restaurants it is used on a daily basis for manager functions" and most recently proved "extremely valuable" by supplying historical data and trends information that made Mother's Day operations smoother and more profitable.

Along with a setup charge that varies by account based on the number of restaurants and other factors involved, Avero charges a per-restaurant, per-month subscription fee of about $175, said Kate Griffin, Avero's vice president of client operations.

Griffin said Avero's tools are integrated with a growing number of P05 system brands, including Micros Retail Systems, Positouch, RPower and Squirrel Systems. She said one of Avero's strengths is its ability to collect and process data from a number of different POS brands or different versions of the same brand, even within a single-client company.

MSRP, which has used Slingshot for about a year, has provided password-protected, Slingshot-Web-page access to all 30 of its front- and back-of-the-house managers, Rothschild explained. He said Slingshot permits MSRP to limit the amount and type of information available to each user based on position or responsibility.

Rothschild described as "phenomenal" Slingshot's "snapshot" page function, which provides summaries from a number of different reports presented as tables and graphs. The snapshot page is configurable by the user.

Rothschild's snapshot recently included a restaurant-by-restaurant recap of gross sales, customer counts and average checks for the previous day and a week-to-week comparison of daily sales at each restaurant. Other pieces of his snapshot included a summary of the most recent period for which there are data for each restaurant, a reminder if any data are missing and a pie graph showing each restaurant's contribution to companywide sales.

Also useful, Rothschild indicated, is Slingshot's "alerts" function. That tool permits management to program Slingshot-to monitor incoming data for indications of a specific phenomenon, such as broad swings in sales compared with the previous day or week or a high number of transaction voids. The software alerts the appropriate manager or corporate executive via e-mail when the targeted limit, range or parameter is reached, he said.