Logan's Roadhouse - The SeQueL
Introduction
In
August 1992, Logan's Roadhouse® made the decision to start using the legacy Squirrel®
ClassicT program as their point of sales system. Ten years later Logan's has completed
the conversion of the 90+ -restaurant chain from Squirrel Classic to Squirrel Classic
Plus. The decision in August 2000, to start upgrading their systems to Squirrel
Classic Plus allowed Logan's to take advantage of the new Squirrel back office HTML
Browser without having to reinvest in the front-of-house hardware, software and
training. The back-of-house platform is based on Microsoft® Windows NT® and SQL
Server 2000. An automated end of day routine converts the data collected at Squirrel
point of sale to the SQL database format.
The
browser interface allowed Logan's to seamlessly combine their custom applications,
third party applications and Squirrel applications to the user desktop on the back
office. This level of customization allowed the Information Services group at Logan's
to create user desktops at the back office that limit functionality to just what
is required by each in-store manager thus reducing many of the support issues that
occurred previously.
In addition to the effectiveness of the back-of-house browser, Scott Dever, Sr.
Director of Information Services, looked for ways to exploit the data that is retained
in the Squirrel database. As Squirrel Classic Plus supports a SQL 2000 database
that is populated as part of the end of day routine, the job for the IS department
was made much easier. Information could be extracted from the database with commonly
used tools and without requiring any proprietary routines to obtain it. The information
obtained from the restaurants would prove to be significantly useful once consolidated.
As part of the planning phase of building the corporate reporting tools, Dever needed to determine:
- What information needed to be sent to the corporate office?
- What is the most effective way to get it there?
- What is the most effective way to use it?
Logan's decided to replicate certain portions of the Squirrel database at the corporate office. In that way, they would have access to the data at the most granular level. They could then use this data to update their Data Warehouse for consolidated reporting.
The next phase of the project was to create the infrastructure to get the information to the corporate office. Logan's created a high speed, wide area network to facilitate the movement of information such as credit card and gift card transactions. Even though the initial investment was significantly greater, the IS department opted to used a wide area network instead of dial up. The network would prove to more cost effective in the long run as there were other initiatives planned where it would be utilized.
Every morning,
corporate initiates a routine to update all the restaurants' data into the corporate
database. Once consolidated, the reporting proved to be instantly useful. In addition
to looking at the traditional consolidated reports, with the extensive detail available,
check level information now became useful. Detailed credit card information is reviewed
for duplicate and potentially costly or fraudulent credit card transactions. Manually
swiped credit cards could potentially prove to be one of the following:
- There was a card reader problem in a particular location which required attention
- There was a communication problem to the CC processor
- There was the possibility of fraudulent activity occurring
With credit card rates being related to whether a card was entered manually or swiped, there was immediate benefit to investigate any problem with a terminal and the replacement of any potential card reader.
Other reports were created to assist in the balancing of credit card information in order to expedite the reconciling routine once the processor's reports were received.
The data gathering
process started in 2001 so reports are now starting to become useful when looking
for trends in other areas such as voids, promos, beverage sales, and product mix.
The consolidation of the data is proving to be more and more useful as it continues
to accumulate.
Distribution of the information was also crucial to the plan. Scott Dever states, "In order to distribute the data to a wide variety of people we utilized the SQL 2000 consolidated Squirrel tables and Microsoft .NETT technology. This allows anybody connected to the network by any means to view the data with nothing more than an Internet browser."
In the near future, Logan's plans to begin testing Squirrel's latest technology with its award winning terminal user interface and real time SQL database. This will truly utilize the complex infrastructure that Dever has created and will give Logans' access to store level data, at corporate as soon as it is entered at the terminal.
