Customer Spotlight: Data's Crowning Achievement
Burger King orders a BI dashboard with everything on it.
13,000 restaurants in 80 countries. More than 11 million customers pass through their doors every day. Burger King is the second largest fast food hamburger chain in the world: and they’ve been in business for over 60 years.
Many people recognize the Burger King brand as a US icon developed from humble beginnings in Florida back in 1954. But now the restaurant business has grown so large globally that most big cities and countries have restaurants they can call their own. In fact, in Russia, Burger King currently operates more than 280 restaurants.
As more and more of those restaurants began to come online: Burger King’s Director of Information Systems Development Maxim Sharapov realized that the data was starting to pile up:
“There was too much information, and it was constantly increasing, so the reporting files were very dense and lengthy to get through which slowed down the work, and it was very inconvenient for our specialists. As the restaurant chain grew, this problem worsened.”
Not only was the volume of data becoming onerous, but Maxim found that being able to gain insights from the sales and financial data was becoming more challenging as well:
“Of course, users would also like to have more flexibility and see the breakdown of meals and transactions - as a result we decided to implement a BI system, as it could solve our problems.”
Analytical reports preparation was carried out with the help of complex files created on the basis of Microsoft Excel. They were very difficult to make changes within, and their performance left much to be desired. The Marketing Director struggled to understand the impact of marketing campaigns, what menu items were ordered together most regularly and how each location performed against its counterparts. Maxim knew exactly what BI requirements that Burger King would need.
- Automatic and incremental data loading
- The normalization of the regional data to a common format
- The ability to export new and changed data
- Interactive and static reporting
- An intuitive user interface…
There’s no escaping it, the list was a Whopper. But Qlik proved to be just the platform Maxim was searching for.
Both Maxim and Qlik wasted no time in getting to work: creating multiple sales analysis applications. The creation of these applications was no small task: the checks analysis app spanned 20 million rows of data. Information on transactions as far back as 2014 totaled a staggering 170 million rows. Aggregated data on each of the regional restaurants as far back as 2011 occupied 600,000 more. Despite this daunting task: Qlik opened up a whole new view into the business.
“The solution turned out to be very flexible and easily customized to suit our requirements. Now we can see the breakdown of revenue by receipts or separate meals, carry out a comparative analysis of each restaurant for the selected period or all of the restaurants in the region."
With these new parameters established for sales and finance, other departments within Burger King sought to find new ways to take advantage of singular access to all this data. Here are just a few they have planned:
- Integrate Qlik with Burger King ERP system and use it to analyze company Gross Margin.
- Create reports on profits and losses plus a detailed analysis of the cost of staff.
- Launch an operations department project to build a daily report on the effectiveness of restaurants.
- Analyze the variety of food sales, sales per hour, marketing campaign effectiveness, coupon use and cross-selling for the marketing department.
This singular source of truth has not only allowed for better data access and insights, but now everyone internally from managers to executives can truly “have it their way”.
