Earl Enterprises Expands Use of Data Central

Internationally renowned hospitality brand Earl Enterprises is expanding its use of Data Central, ParTech Inc.’s back-office solution. 

Earl Enterprise’s full-service dining brands include Buca di Beppo, Brio Italian Grille and Guy Fieri’s Chicken Guy. The company, which was already using Data Central at its TooJay’s restaurants for 14 years, decided to expand its use of Data Central across the enterprise, allowing its existing restaurants to seamlessly integrate with existing point-of-sale programs, accounting, payroll systems and more. It will also implement the technology to all future locations of its brands moving forward.

“We believe Data Central to be the best-of-breed back-of-house solution for our brands,” said Tom Seeker, Chief Information Officer for Earl Enterprises. “Data Central is seamless and it will be a simple solution for not only our accounting purposes, but also for inventory management, scheduling and data management. PAR’s tech stack keeps everything in one place, so this partnership was a no-brainer on our end.”

With Data Central, companies can track inventory from delivery through preparation to help manage waste and food costs. It also easily communicates scheduling with employees through multiple devices. Management can easily access data – such as daily sales and server performance. 

Long-Time User

During the past 20 years of his restaurant technology career, Seeker has used Data Central (previously known as Restaurant Magic) and other PAR products at several other restaurant companies.

“I've been with multiple different companies engaged with multiple different levels with PAR and with Brink,”(PAR’s POS system)  Seeker explained.  “I got to know the team there very, very well.” 

All About the Data

These days restaurants of all sizes are looking for seamless integrations to help them gain actionable insights from their data.  Seeker says PAR has been championing the open API for years. “They've been trying to decentralize words like ‘point of sale’ and make it more of a full-integrated system,” he said.

Earl Enterprises has 13 different restaurant brands with 220+ locations.  “We have multiple, different point of sales, we have several different back of houses and trying to get all that data from all four corners of the world is very difficult,” said Seeker. “Data Central is a strong product.”

For Seeker, the people behind the product make the difference.

“I know it's gonna sound crazy, but as important as the API, as  important as it is for the software to work the way it's advertised, it's more about the people. For me there's a lot of great tech out there, and there's a lot of great back-of-house softwares, but when it comes down to it … the one thing that made me settle in the direction that I did was the people. From top to bottom left to right, every single person that I work with at that company has been very open, very forward, very willing to jump through hoops to help us do whatever it is that we need to accomplish.  The teamwork and the product is second to none.”  

Seeker and his team are in the process of integrating Data Central and expect to have the entire corporation moved over by the end of the fiscal year, he explained.