Real-Time Store Ops Analysis — From A Receipt Printer?

May 2013 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

By Matt Pillar, editor in chief

Moe’s Southwest Grill franchisee gets far-ranging, real-time data analysis from a cloud-based service that pulls data from its receipt printers.

Robert Dreesch works in Atlanta, hours away from the three Chattanooga, TN, and Huntsville, AL, Moe’s Southwest Grills he owns and operates. Thanks to the cloud services provider he’s been working with for more than a year, the distance is no longer a barrier to getting real-time insight into day-to-day operations at his stores.

Dreesch owns Brace International Holdings, LLC, which has been a Moe’s Franchisee since 2003. For the majority of that time his best insight into store operations performance—such as sales/labor budget correlation, promotion performance, and POS exceptions like voids—came from the journal-style queries he pulled from the back end of his stores’ Panasonic POS systems. “To run a report, I would have to log into the server at each store and take it over for a time to get to the data I wanted,” he explains. “Those reports generated a lot of hard data, which would require further querying to get to the specific information I wanted.”