Big data. It’s what retail companies use to track products and consumer behavior to deliver customized services or purchase suggestions.
Restaurant companies are essentially retailers of food and service, and their operation is influenced by many of the same factors as retail companies. However, competition among restaurants is extremely intense, considering dining options are constantly increasing.
With so many metrics that restaurants can review, such as cuisine price, labor cost, local customer amount, and table turnover rate, analytics solutions are starting to be implemented in order to get a better insight on this data. In 2013, the Cheesecake Factory began to apply IBM big data analytics to help deliver high quality dining experience and uncover consumer patterns. “By analyzing big data, restaurants will know what they need to do to stay fresh, evolve, and maintain an emotional relationship with their customers,” said Donald Moore, Chief Culinary Officer at The Cheesecake Factory.
Using IBM Watson Analytics, a powerful cloud analytic tool, Cresco International helps restaurant owners reveal a new business concept. With built-in data exploration functions, you can import all key restaurant metrics and explore this data by asking Watson Analytics specific questions, or by clicking on generated questions, for analysis.
Another step using Watson Analytics is data visualization where you can explore, analyze, and discover patterns among crucial data attributes – such as where are the majority of restaurants are located, what is the most popular cuisine, how much do restaurants pay for labor cost, etc. All data files, including transaction records, historical business information and store demographic can be merged and analyzed. Watson Analytics also streamlines the entire planning process and reduces overall report cycle to only a few steps. In minutes, executives can create and share dashboards and visualizations.
