Founded in 1984, AppleGrove Restaurants is one of the oldest franchisees of Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill and Bar.
Now, with more than 100 restaurants in 8 states, AppleGrove is also one of the largest franchisees. In addition to making ongoing investments in its people, AppleGrove continues to support its aggressive growth by making investments in its infrastructure, including its financial reporting and forecasting systems.
Setting the strategy
When its corporate office in Atlanta, Georgia, realised that forecasting for so many restaurants using spreadsheets was too time-consuming, AppleGrove began investigating various systems to streamline the process. After looking at several solutions, they realised they needed to select one that could grow with the company and enable expansion into other departments across the organisation. AppleGrove chose Infor™ PM Business Process Applications (BPAs) for the solution’s flexibility, ease of use, and robustness.
Getting business specific
After one year of using Infor PM BPAs, AppleGrove has seen remarkable progress toward their expanded goal of enhancing overall business performance management. According to Controller Trish Farley, “We knew the Infor solution’s ease of use, especially for people at the front end—marketing, accounting, payroll, and restaurant managers—would allow us to ramp up quickly. This was our key issue.”
Seeing results
Today, says Farley, “Everyone can easily pull up a file, slice and dice data, and do ad hoc reporting. And because of the solution’s flexibility, they’ve requested many changes to fine-tune the whole process of forecasting.
The Infor application has enabled directors to perform mid-year reforecasting that incorporates updated modifications, and we’re already seeing efficiency gains.”
The next phase of implementation at AppleGrove includes integrating the reporting process. “We now do dual reporting, in which our restaurants do flash reporting that’s followed up by model reporting using Microsoft Great Plains in our corporate office,” says Farley.
“We want to phase out the initial reporting step because it creates two financial statements and takes accounting several days to explain why they are different. If we integrate the data in Infor PM BPAs, we can quickly create one accurate version that everyone can access on the web.”
One challenge that organisations often face when implementing changes that affect the way employees perform their jobs is to get the employees to buy in to the new plan.
“After training, our directors were able to perform online changes and watch how formulas were recalculated automatically, and they were immediately impressed,” says Farley. “With the additional time that we’ll save, everyone now can focus more on analysis and new restaurant openings.”
When AppleGrove first began implementing the application, they depended on Infor to help them optimise their processes.
“Infor made the commitment to implement our system in a timely manner, and we continue to reap the benefits. Presales and sales worked to tailor the demo according to our specific needs, and the help desk has been patient, knowledgeable, and experienced. Everyone has remained in contact with us to ensure we’re always getting quality, comprehensive, and timely answers.”
Being open to an enterprising future
An important goal for AppleGrove is to cross-reference statistical and financial data to compile statistics for benchmarking. “We have multiple systems carrying different data in each, but we aren’t able to cross-reference it anywhere,” says Farley.
“Now we’re beginning to transfer key restaurant data from these systems into Infor PM BPAs, which will allow us to create cross-references with our statistical information. We will be able to analyse product, customer service, and financial statistics to benchmark data—a process we were unable to do in the past.”
Another future task which AppleGrove expects to accomplish using Infor’s solution is collecting product mix data that details the amounts of food and beverages sold in their restaurants. “To avoid re-keying thousands of data lines that we have now only in printed form,” Farley says, “we know we can transfer electronic files into Infor PM BPAs and start consolidating and running reports extracting appropriate data.”
Says Farley, “The Infor solution has offered so much more than just forecasting for us. It’s become a catalyst for solving other issues not even related to forecasting. We continually find new ways to use it for getting the information we need that provides us with valuable insight to improve and expand our business.”
