FORT WALTON BEACH Fla. Prior to deploying Restaurant Technology Inc.’s RTIconnect back-office software, 39-unit Arby’s franchisee Beavers Inc., based here, tried a variety of approaches to manage its far-flung operations, RTI indicated.
“We were using spreadsheets. There was nothing connected to the home office. Everything was coming in on paper,” said Greg Thompson, Beavers Inc. vice president of operations. That reality didn’t mesh with his belief that “we needed to have instant data about our restaurants’ performance.”
According to representatives of Atlanta-based RTI, Beavers’ supervisors benefit from RTIconnect’s online accessibility and can view store results simultaneously with their restaurants’ managers. “Although we still insist that our supervisors visit stores two to three times a week, RTIconnect enables them to do their job without physically going to each location,” operations chief Thompon explained. He added that the software has saved the company 1 percent on overall labor costs by generating labor schedules based on sales forecasts and blocking unauthorized employee time-clock punching, among other improvements.
