CraftWorks Restaurants and Breweries (now SPB Hospitality) proudly serve the finest craft beer and made-from-scratch creative cuisine. With nearly 200 restaurants operating under 14 different brands, they employ close to 12,000 people in serving approximately 80,000 guests each day. Their restaurants range from traditional casual dining concepts to fine dining white tablecloth establishments.
Their largest brands include Old Chicago, Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurants, and Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery. With over 70 of the locations featuring fresh brewed beer on-site, they are the world’s leading operator of brewery restaurants.
For CraftWorks, operating a successful and growing business had several challenges. Management needed not only visibility and accessibility to their point of sale (POS) data across multiple locations – but also required a much more comprehensive view into all operational functions within their business including Payroll, Inventory, Purchasing, Recipes, Sales, and Labor to better understand the health of the overall business. However, manually consolidating reports from across the business took several days to complete. Along with different systems in place for payroll, inventory, and accounts payable, staff had to comprehend non-standard processes and data in multiple geographical locations.
CraftWorks required a turnkey solution for the entire company to access operational information anytime, anywhere. In addition, this solution would have to not only be POS agnostic and easy to install across the current set of legacy systems in the company, but ideally be on one central web-based platform that could encompass their other areas of operations and provide an environment for scale that supports their growing business.
CraftWorks selected R365 to achieve business insight into all of its locations. R365 provided a comprehensive integrated suite of highly configurable modules allowing CraftWorks management and staff to easily navigate POS data at a glance as well as Inventory, Recipes, and Accounts Payable information via a series of modular based intuitive decision support tools. As the company continues to grow and expand, the implementation of R365 provides an easy, accessible method for visibility into the entire organization. All levels of the organization from executives to the executive chefs use R365 to view how the operation is performing.
CraftWorks implemented the base R365 modules along with optional modules including General Sales Ledger (Financial module), Accounts Payable, Inventory, Recipes, and Payroll. R365 is designed to provide critical information essential to the needs of CraftWorks. R365 extracts the critical data from sales, labor, and accounting that yields key intelligence upon which profitable business decisions are made.
Being point-of-sale (POS) agnostic, R365 easily integrated with the variety of POS systems installed at CraftWorks, such as Micros, Aloha, and Positouch. As the company acquired more stores, R365 was rolled out effortlessly, immediately gathering business intelligence on the new and existing locations irrespective of the concept under the CraftWorks banner.
R365 helps to streamline and negate a lot of manual invoice data entry by implementing Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) via multiple vendors. The electronic invoices flow directly into the Accounts Payable module which drives the cost calculations via their purchases.
R365 offers CraftWorks a web-based recipe management solution that gives their team detailed insight into theoretical vs. actual food costs and how they impact the bottom line. Now they have seamless access to a consolidated and online database containing all recipe ingredients fully integrated with food costs (derived from the purchases in the Accounts Payable module). This ensures both consistent food quality and comprehensive cost management throughout their entire organization.
“The ROI with these cost basis improvements, as well as other general and administrative savings gained by implementing R365 was over 2.5%.” stated Alex Birnbaum, Vice President Information Technology for CraftWorks.
“In addition, the R365 solution has a wealth of labor orientated charts, alerts, dashboards and reports that have made a significant contribution in terms of effectively managing our labor resources across each concept and locations at a corporate, regional and restaurant level right across the USA. The labor savings for CraftWorks have been recognized as 1% – which for an organization our size is quite considerable” Birnbaum went on to say.
“CraftWorks needed one solution for reporting, payroll, inventory, recipes, and accounts payable. Anytime you focus on numbers, you can improve your cost basis. RADAR allows us to use our data to make measurable improvements to the bottomline.”
The ROI with these cost basis improvements, as well as other general and administrative savings gained by implementing R365 was over 2.5%.
Alex birnbaum, VP of Information Technology
Craftworks
With R365, CraftWorks gained the visibility, efficiency, and control they needed to support growth across all locations. From automated invoice processing to recipe cost tracking and labor management, the platform helped streamline operations and improve profitability across the board. For a company built on great food, craft beer, and exceptional guest experiences, R365 delivered the tools to keep everything running smoothly behind the scenes—so the team could stay focused on what matters most.
1% reduction
in labor costs
2.5% ROI
from cost basis improvements and G&A savings
POS-agnostic integration
for immediate insights without disrupting operations
Discover how you can start achieving savings like these for your business
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Restaurant365 bridges the gap between accounting and operations by centralizing all data, helping restaurant operators to become more efficient, accurately forecast, and tackle any challenge or opportunity with speed and accuracy.
