For years we have been working with operations of dispersed locations in foodservice, restaurants, hotels, and retail, and for all that time, we've been chasing the goose with the golden egg of real-time operational and financial data.
Any highly transactional, dispersed business knows the importance of getting quality data as close to real-time as possible, and for some organizations, that could mean a couple of weeks after months end - that’s potentially 42 days after your first day of operation, and as any operator will tell you, that’s a lot of time for things to go pear-shaped, and horribly wrong.
It’s a compounded issue in high-volume, low-margin businesses, where every penny and every basis point counts. With margins so slim, it’s no wonder that the restaurant business has the highest failure rate of any business sector.
"If revenue is for vanity, cash and profit are certainly king, and data is gold. In fact, some say that data today is more valuable than liquid gold, oil, and that is probably true."
Turn noise into data into insights you can see and drive business impact.
For example, in the food business, you have your major costs of labor and food comprising the lion’s share of your operating costs. These two alone, in some cases, can represent up to 85% of your operating costs. Add to that, any business where there are high volumes of cash creates the risk of shrinkage. Unchecked labor hours, over time, can add up to potentially catastrophic business outcomes.
Like any complex business problem with such high stakes, there have been plenty of efforts in the past to come up with a solution.
In some cases, organizations have tried to solve the span of control by having a singular point-of-sale operating system, but that can be costly, difficult, and in the case of foodservice operators working with a myriad of client-owned systems, near impossible.
Operators and entrepreneurs have tried to come up with operating systems that try and capture and control the very dynamic nature of these operations, but with low success levels and adoption.
“Operators who have tried to build their own systems end up spending twice the budget, taking double the time, and in the end, their platforms do half the things they hoped for to truly fix the very real business issues.”
There have also been a string of innovators over the years who have tried to solve the puzzle but ended up trying to boil the ocean and fixing bits, creating complex, difficult-to-adopt platforms and resulting in low levels of take-up and adoption.
"We're not in the business of software, and for those who have dared, then the saying applies - it'll take twice as long, cost twice as much, and do half the things you wanted it to do in the first place."
At 4xi, we’ve worked with established technology partners to adapt existing platforms that span multiple use cases, and now specifically for operating organizations of dispersed operations.
We believe that the nub of the matter is to measure the things that matter the most in real time. Your Management Accounts can look after the rest.
This important work has focused on three main issues faced by businesses today:
Real-time visibility into operational performance and standards
Real-time visibility into financial performance and flash reporting
Answering the unanswerable questions of the past
Elevate is a “Business in Your Pocket” platform that empowers your entire business and engages them in a continual 360-degree audit of your business.
Everyone everywhere is engaged in measuring your daily performance in line with your operating standards and key performance measurements and also takes in customer and employee sentiment. Elevate is created on the premise that everyone is responsible for quality and excellence each and every day.
DATAxi is a data ingestion and visualization platform providing you with real-time data, insights, and the ability to make real-time decisions.
DATAxi FLASH REPORTING gathers the data that means the most to you via an easy-to-use app from each of your operations.
Manage cash, labor, purchasing, expenses, and turnkey performance metrics like Labor to Sales Per Hour, Participation, Check Average, and much more. Imagine this in a live feed dashboard, alerting exceptions, remedial operations, and high-performance outlets that warrant recognition.
DATAxi INSIGHTS provides the opportunity to answer questions previously unanswerable before. You provide the question; we’ll look at the available public and private data sources to help answer the questions, then we’ll put together the platform, which will give you a fully searchable, comparable dashboard for you to cross-analyze the data and answer your questions like never before.
To the point about “why it’s important” for dispersed operations portfolios:
Increased visibility leads to data and insights that can drive action.
Increases accountability of operators.
Insights lead to actions that improve performance.
Opportunities to drive impactful efficiencies.
Opportunity to drive and monitor global operating standards
And the impact:
- Each 1% business improvement across a $1,000M portfolio is substantial.
- Each 1% of procurement revenue visibility is significant.
- Tracking performance to agreed KPIs is critical.
- Compliance with Governance, including QBRs, and Leadership Visitation, is important.
We understand the data input puzzle too, and that is exactly why we deliberately chose not to go down the (in most cases) impassable data integration route or expect operators at the portfolio level to try to aggregate data but focus more on the front-line folks to take just 10 minutes to input the most valuable data that create maximum visibility and impact.
“These data platforms from 4xi represent the best opportunity I have seen for years to help operators get better visibility to their business, make real-time decisions, and therefore control their own destiny and success.”
These groundbreaking platforms are ideal for operators of dispersed locations but also for client organizations managing multiple partners across their portfolio and any business wishing to get deeper data and insights.
VISIBILITY LIKE NEVER BEFORE.
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