Real-Time Analytics: 10 Ways To Get It Right

Fine Tune Operations

Large companies use real-time and near-real-time analytics to operate more efficiently. And the trend is moving downstream.

Restaurant Management Company is one of the largest Pizza Hut franchisees. It owns 140 locations in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, New Jersey, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. The company tracks how long it takes to make a pizza, how long it takes for an order to be processed, how long a pizza sits on a rack before a delivery driver picks it up, how long a delivery driver is on the road, and how many deliveries a driver takes at one time.

"We track everything," said Ken Syvarth, chief operating officer of Restaurant Management Company, in an interview.

The company recently started monitoring pizza ovens, freezers, and HVAC systems, purportedly in real time, to reduce energy costs. It expanded a seven-store SiteSage energy management system pilot to 57 stores. The system monitors events such as when a pizza oven or freezer is turned on or off, and the temperature of the unit, and it controls the HVAC systems. When an operating time or temperature is out of range, an area manager receives an alert about the problem.

"If it's really hot outside, a restaurant manager may crank up the air conditioning to 65 degrees and let it run all day, and at night [she may] forget to turn the air conditioner down, so it's cranking all night long," said Syvarth. Eliminating such energy wasting behavior by providing alerts to managers is "where we see a real savings," he added.

This type of alert is being used in other ways as well. For example, if a walk-in freezer is left off after a person does inventory, a manager is alerted when the temperature reaches a certain threshold in order to prevent the store from losing product.

(Image: bhumann34 via Pixabay)