Enterprise data warehouse and a standardized business intelligence platform.

The Steak n Shake Company is a full service, casual dining restaurant open 24 hours a day. One of the oldest restaurant chains in the United States, Steak n Shake offers made-to-order food at the speed and price of fast food. Like many midsized companies Steak n Shake had to overcome challenges within the IT, operations and finance groups in order to truly consolidate company data to help drive same-store sales across the enterprise. When Steak n Shake embarked on a multi-year strategy to achieve sustained same-store sales growth and market expansion, the company was faced with many of these same challenges.

Specifically, in order for the project to succeed, the technical team needed to consolidate internal skill sets, streamline reporting and provide field users and corporate business units with self-service reporting capability.

On the operations side, store managers needed to spend less time analyzing numbers and questioning the data, and more time taking care of associates and guests. For finance, the objective was to align corporate strategy with operational metrics and measure performance to plan.

For Steak n Shake, like many multi-site restaurants and retail companies, the ultimate goal is to make better use of all key metrics associated with how the company manages its business, whether its working to improve leadership, retrain associates, or focus on hitting margins in order to drive same-store sales.

Working together with Steak n Shake, we delivered two complementary technology assets: an enterprise data warehouse and a single business intelligence platform.

Tapping years of expertise creating information management systems for dispersed companies, it was clear that an enterprise data warehouse would provide a single source of information for company data, while a single business intelligence platform would enable the company to focus on its key economic drivers and would help drive performance management and profitable growth.

In order to make the information as accessible as possible, the data warehouse design included a "one-stop-shopping" portal for employees that provided dashboards, reporting and analysis ability, all of which was delivered in less than 120 days.

To help ensure successful adoption of the new solution across the company, we worked with Steak n Shake to implement several unique project strategies:

• Create a team of company executives and subject matter experts responsible for project prioritization, requirements gathering, strategic alignment and governance
• Design and build an infrastructure that is scalable to meet current demand and long term growth
• A focus on simplification and user perception
• Begin the project with the revenue-generating business units

Steak n Shake's new system was deployed to more than 2,000 users across the company's corporate offices and 483 restaurants. Today, Steak n Shake has a standardized reporting process and provides users with a single and complete view of the business with minimal IT overhead and intervention.

Associates in 500 locations use reports generated by the business intelligence solution to manager labor, manage quality and cleanliness standards, improve guest satisfaction, and manage financials. Analysis tools are used by marketing, payroll and finance, and executives use dashboards to stay on top of daily performance and strategic trends.

The self-service reporting capabilities provide employees with easy access to information that is more accurate and timely. Equally important, restaurant managers can now judge the day-to-day health of their restaurants quickly and easily, enabling them to make better decisions in support of the company's growth targets and corporate strategies. For example, operators now use dashboards to:

• Measure sales and average check performance;
• Manage food, labor and other controllable costs;
• Understand customer satisfaction based on third-party surveys; and
• Increase speed of service for drive-through sales to maintain and grow market share.

In addition to giving leadership greater visibility into restaurant performance and freeing up additional time for the IT department to devote to other projects, the company is seeing impressive, quantifiable results since the solution's implementation. Steak n Shake has reduced overall spending through doing more with less, associate turnover is at a record low, overall guest satisfaction levels are near record levels, and speed of services times have decreased substantially.

Further, the business intelligence system has been a big win for the company in regards to employee satisfaction. Store managers gave the system an impressive 96 percent rate of satisfaction, with 91 percent stating that it's easy to train new users and 85 percent indicating that the solution saves them time every day.