North Building Technology Pavilion, Booth 6383

What if you could know how closely your beer or ice cream sales are related to the weather? How about knowing that you could increase sales if you offered soda rather than wine with a certain entrée? Maybe you would send different promotional emails if you knew how sales were impacted by one offer versus another? All of these insights are available right now.

Sound complicated? It is, and the legacy reporting tools used by many restaurants today are not up to the task. Sure, it is nice to know what happened yesterday or last week, and it is even nicer to get that info presented on something better than a spreadsheet. However, it takes a comprehensive analytics solution to do the heavy lifting necessary for a restaurant operator to get real, actionable insights. Fortunately, there are options that do not require a team of data scientists or an expensive infrastructure.

Comprehensive solutions, like the Actus Data Smart Restaurant Solution, orchestrate data from multiple sources into a single view that can be used to improve decision making right away. Individually, data from POS, finance, labor management, and inventory systems can only go so far. When this data is combined, powerful analytics can uncover unique relationships that will improve results. Add automated tasks and notifications to the mix and an operator will gain increased efficiency as well.

There will be a wide variety of reporting tools and technologies on display at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago later this month, but it is important to remember that reporting is not the same as analytics. Although reporting tools can make data easier to consume, what really matters are the insights derived from that data and how operators can use these insights to take action.

If you going to be at the show, please stop by booth 6383 and say hi!