June 01, 2015 // Franchising.com // Business intelligence (BI) and data warehouse solutions provider iOLAP Inc. has combined Syncsort’s DMX data integration software with Yellowfin’s BI platform and Amazon Redshift for data warehousing to provide one of America’s most successful food chains, Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, with deep operational insight across its 500 U.S. restaurants.
The advanced analytics solution, Smoke Stack, uses the latest Big Data technology and is hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-platform for flexibility and to minimize ongoing resource requirements. It was developed in response to the phenomenal growth of Dickey’s business and inability of its previous store-by-store reporting tool to combine data from all restaurants and source systems to provide critical company-wide insights.
“Dickey’s needed an easy and cost-effective way to integrate, analyze and act on valuable business data by creating advanced visualizations and performing data analytics with minimal on-site infrastructure and support personnel,” said Laura Rea Dickey, CIO for Dickey’s Barbecue Restaurants. “By leveraging the scalability and reliability of AWS, the power and speed of Syncsort’s DMX data integration platform, and the intuitive data discovery in Yellowfin, the platform gives us a rich, immersive system to access, query and analyze our rapidly growing and changing business data. We can now quickly and easily understand and act on vital sales, labor, inventory costs and customer satisfaction KPIs throughout our business.”
The hosted cloud application, delivered by iOLAP, includes:
“Smoke Stack has made data-driven business insights quick and easy to attain, allowing us to focus our efforts on using our data instead of manually analyzing it,” continued Laura Rea Dickey. “This significant improvement to our reporting and analytics environment translates into more dollars saved and earned. In addition, the ease-of-use has allowed us to seamlessly integrate the data technology into our everyday operations, introducing it to non-technical business users, all without painfully changing business processes. This flexibility has been key to user adoption and given us valuable insights. Smoke Stack has bridged the gap for us from data that is merely accessible, to data that is valuable, timely, manageable and actionable."
Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants, Inc., the nation's largest barbecue chain was founded in 1941 by Travis Dickey with the goal of authentic slow smoked barbecue. Today, all meats are still slow smoked on-site in each restaurant living up to the company tagline, "We Speak Barbecue." The Dallas-based family-run barbecue franchise offers a quality selection of signature meats, home style sides, tangy barbecue sauce and free kids' meals every Sunday. The fast-casual concept has expanded to over 400 locations in 40 states. This year Dickey's Barbecue was recognized for the third year by Nation's Restaurant News as a "Top 10 Growth Chain" and by Technomic as the "Fastest-growing restaurant chain in the country." For more information, visit www.dickeys.com or for barbecue franchise opportunities call 866-340-6188.
SOURCE Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants, Inc.
Kendall Huber
972.248.9899
khuber@dickeys.com
Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants, Inc. was founded in 1941 by Travis Dickey with the goal of authentic slow smoked barbecue.