Casting a Wide Net
Some might ask why would you put a WAN in for your company? You have pretty reliably modems that work fine. Youire getting all the data you need. What more is there? But, youid be surprised how much more there is to it.
Most importantly, a WAN improves access to critical information. This is the data youire polling every day, but you are forced to keep the size of the files at a minimum to get reasonable speed and reasonable accuracy. Well all of a sudden you can get to a lot more data. Thatis the first perspective folks have: I can get more out of my restaurant.
Real WAN advantages
A WAN also allows a restaurant company to push more from the corporate office down to the restaurant. You can extend your systems if itis possible. Suddenly, with accounts payable, you can have the restaurants enter data right into the AP system. There are a lot of ways you can utilize a WAN that might not be immediately apparent.
Now what has Bertucciis gotten out of its WAN? As with any IT project, the central question is: Is it better for guests? Weire in hospitality; we care about our guests.
The answer is yes. Speed helps. Credit cards, for example, are a lot faster. Other systems that we migrated to the network are also faster and easier. So the manager now is spending less time in the back office.
Where we really saw impact at Bertucciis was in carryout. Folks can walk in the door and pay with a credit card. It takes 10 seconds because our operators do a great job at having all the stuff ready and packed right because thatis what we do. In certain locations, 70 percent of our business is carryout. When guests pay with a credit card at carry out, itis faster than cash.
Vastly improved data transfer is another key advantage. All of our polling is much more reliable and absolutely faster. Polling used to take two minutes, now it takes 10 seconds.
With the WAN, our intranet has become this whole different animal. I just rolled out a new intranet and we spent a lot of time and effort in training and development. Now, everybodyis using everything. They love it.
Since this rollout, our Help Desk calls have also gone down. With a WAN, I have one employee that can remotely upgrade systems in one day. Heis a maniac, but he can connect every site, log in to the administrator, make his change, and fix what heis got to fix. As a result, in a year Bertucciis will have the most comprehensive HRIS system Iive ever seen and it will all be hosted, leaving nothing in the restaurant at all.
Trust in the network
You have to trust in your network and know that over two or three years, you have to continue to leverage it and get value out of it and then comes your return. It's not necessarily going to be pure dollar savings. All the soft, nice things are your big returns. The managers are not in the office as much, credit-card processing is faster--these kinds of things definitely make a big difference. And I think the quality of life of our management has been impacted a little bit. It used to take about 20 minutes to close a restaurant at night, now it takes eight. Theyire home to their families 20 minutes earlier every day. Whatis the value there? I donit know, perhaps Bertucciis is a better place to work.
Jim Lux is VP IT at Bertucciis, 2003 Edge Award winner.