Background
Few pizza shops are as iconic and beloved as New York City’s Sbarro. Founded in Midtown Manhattan in 1956 by Naples’ Sbarro family, it has since grown to more than 600 locations in 28 countries, including one restaurant in the Pentagon. In 2016, when Sbarro Holdings, Inc. joined R365, they had recently moved into their new headquarters Columbus, Ohio, leaving behind archaic accounting and payroll systems for a modern, restaurant-specific solution for accessible, comprehensive reporting across the organization and a commitment to treat their entire franchise groups like family.Challenge
Sbarro’s legacy accounting system was cumbersome to use and learn as it also presented challenges for strategic and day-to-day tasks. “We didn’t have any real standardized reports,” said Sbarro Holdings, Inc. Chief Financial Officer Brian Daniels. “The accounting team was the only group really that had access to the system.” That lack of reports put a sizable, additional workload onto the accounting team. Meanwhile, those reporting challenges limited effective discussions on improving operations between franchisees, operators, and various holding company departments. As larger, international organization Sbarro also conducted a number of regular intercompany transactions that under an old system had to be manually recorded. In order to solve these problems, Sbarro’s lean team needed an integrated platform that understood its needs as a restaurant company and approached them with a strategy to streamline the various systems that monitor expenses and revenues and provide all the information the company needed without additional overhead.
Solution
As soon as Sbarro implemented Restaurant365 it received a wide array of valuable, out-of-the-box reports alongside the ability to create and subscribe to custom reports to meet its specific operating needs and performance criteria. R365 integrated all of Sbarro’s technology providers, including POS systems, vendors, and banks to eliminate manual work while increasing the accuracy and timeliness of the data operators and corporate leaders received.
“The ability to manage all operating metrics like the prime costs of food and labor, will make it easier for us to provide benchmarking and support to our franchisees,” Daniels said. They can see immediately how their results compare to other franchisees and the company performance.”
"The ability to manage all operating metrics like the prime costs of food and labor will make it easier for us to provide benchmarking and support to our franchisees."
Results
As a result of its partnership with Restaurant365, Sbarro has begun distributing the platform to its franchisees to promote better margins and better pizza. The company also reduced its period close by a week while taking the manual work of its AP processes and remaining lean while having greater access to meaningful data both at the corporate and franchisee levels.
