A Patina Restaurant Group and Avero Success Story
The Challenge:
Patina Restaurant Group boasts over 50 restaurants across the United States founded on the mission to “provide guests with the very finest quality cuisine, exceptional service and genuine hospitality at their landmark locations and award-winning restaurants.” The group’s work goes beyond restaurants to include catering, weddings, sports & entertainment, cultural centers and more. This flourishing group is the product of the vision of Nick Valenti and Chef Joachim Splichai who wanted to establish a bi-coastal boutique restaurant and food service company. Their work began together as early as 1989 when Joachim first founded Patina Restaurant Group and has continued to grow since then.
As VP of IT for Patina Restaurant Group, Steve LaBrie is responsible for overseeing all of Patina Group’s IT needs across all 50 locations. Since joining Patina Group, Steve has been instrumental in integrating a voice and data system for the company, saving significant annual IT costs, and ensuring PCI compliance across the organization. Steve is a veteran in the restaurant industry having served as the VP of IT with SBE entertainment and in IT at House of Blues prior to coming to Patina.
In 2011, Steve and the Patina team were contemplating buying or building a business analytics tool for the organization. They had grown significantly in the last several years and needed a way to easily analyze group performance at the corporate level, align operators around the country on financial goals and empower the whole organization with the insights they needed to improve their operation.
Time to Take Action:
As they evaluated the option to buy vs. build an analytics system, here is what they considered:
1) Cost of Build, Implementation and Maintenance. The cost to build a system in-house required hiring a SQL developer to build the database infrastructure, maintaining a data warehouse, and keeping a SQL developer on staff to make improvements and maintain the integrity of the system. The whole project would have cost at least $370K to build and over $150K to maintain annually. Avero was able to provide a secure, out-of-the-box solution at half the cost for both web and mobile access to business performance with regular software updates and enhancements for free.
2) Time to Build, Implementation and Maintenance. The time it would take for Steve and his team to build & implement a system in-house would have been 12+ months. The corporate IT team would to have been heavily involved in the build and implementation of the system and would have deferred significant resources from other projects. Avero provided a secure solution that was implemented within one month of signing and required minimal IT resources to implement.
3) Ease of Use and Flexibility for All Departments. The system that was scoped to be built in-house would allow for operators to access a dashboard of template reports and for the IT team to generate custom reports from the SQL database interface. This system would give limited insights to the operations team, because if they had further questions about the performance they were seeing, they would need to put a request into IT to get a custom piece of information pulled. This process would mean operators would not easily be able to get timely or relevant insights. Avero’s solutions provide a user-friendly and intuitive interface with simple drill-downs into any insight. On a daily basis, with a few clicks, operators can easily drill down into all parts of the operation to answer questions about server performance, menu item optimization, promotion effectiveness, and more all without any work from IT.
The Bottom Line:
Avero was able to quickly provide a simple, secure, and scalable solution at a fraction of the cost. Any new outlet Patina opens can be added to Avero with very minimal IT support and no additional infrastructure investments. Customers save time, drive profits, and get answers fast with Avero restaurant software.
