How Dickey’s BBQ Pit uses Big Data?

Major Big Data goals, outcomes, and impact

Source: Dickey’s.com

Dickey’s BBQ Pit at a Glance

• A fast-food casual restaurant founded in 1941 in Dallas, Texas as a family-owned business
• Key product as slow cooked meats
• Franchising began in 1994, customized to locations
• More than 500 locations in 44 states
• International location in UAE since 2018

Big Data Goals

• Getting better business insights on a real-time basis to enable immediate decisions/corrective actions as well as serve as inputs to executives to frame high-level strategies.
• Guide & improve all aspects of the business including operations, marketing, training, branding, and menu development by integrating data from multiple sources.
• Gain deeper operational insights to increase sales, revenue, profits, and stay ahead of the competition and act on KPIs pertaining to sales, inventory costs, labor, and customer satisfaction.

Outcomes

In a restaurant business, speed is key to make to break profit margins. Late decisions could result in high waste, increased expenditure, low margin and even bankruptcy. Store-by-store data is consolidated for a corporate view. With the ability to examine data every 20 minutes, functional as well as business objectives are being met with the Big Data efforts. Dickey’s can deploy resources to course-correct every 12–24 hrs., a radical shift from reacting to weeks old or several months old data. Real-time insights enable quick decision-making saving dollars & resulting in higher margins.

How do you think Dickey’s uses data dashboards? Single or multiple?Dickey’s has different, flexible dashboards based on job roles right from the boardroom to the restaurant floor. The goal is to provide access to data and insights that help improve business performance. The user-friendly dashboard provides insights to non-technical business users to seamlessly integrate data technology into everyday operational decisions.

As a franchisor, does Dickey’s emphasize its use of data to improve business results?
From the testimonials, it is apparent that Dickey’s wants its franchisees to prosper. Dickey’s website uses non-technical language to appeal to franchisors. It does not heavily emphasize the use of Big Data but sprinkles subtle messaging. However, in practice, it can be concluded that Dickey’s uses Big Data to drive business results, improve operational efficiencies, and scale business.

What would you tell potential franchisees?
As a family operated nation’s largest barbeque restaurant chain, few areas where Dickey’s helps potential franchisees:

• Finding a site based on numerous factors that drive traffic.
• Assisting with targeted marketing strategies ad campaigns for six revenue streams including dine-in, catering, retail items, holiday meals, online ordering, and delivery.
• Designing menu items that yield high profitability and add to brand value.
• Providing a proprietary ordering system that is a gold-mine of data for priceless customer insights.
• KPI-tracking Smoke Stack 2.0 streamline business operations enabled via tablet, providing data at the tap of a finger.
• Training designed based on mining data from 500+ franchisees, POS/loyalty/campaigns/inventory data.

References:

1. Franchise Owner Reviews, https://franchise.dickeys.com/why-dickeys/testimonials/
2. Press release, 2015, https://www.dickeys.com/press/in-the-news/tech-in-a-box-how-dickeys-uses-big-data-to-target-marketing-strategies