Aloha Enterprise Reporting

*Aloha Enterprise.com Reference List*

Cosí

Cosí has been using Aloha Enterprise since July 1999. We have been as user for the Aloha Table Service software since January of 1999. Currently, Cosí operates 70 café concepts in the northeastern United States. Those 70 locations are divided into four regions and those regions are divided into districts. The approach we use for day-to-day operations makes a product like Enterprise invaluable. Not only do we use the POS software with Aloha Technologies we use most back-office software; labor manager, inventory control, accounts receivable/frequent-buyer, and gift certificates. Having a central location to reference this data is essential for running effective operations. There are so many benefits to the software, but I will focus on a few of the top attributes we have seen the most success with.

1. Sales - The ability to mine data down to the transaction level for every location is amazing. This data is not just available once a day, but updated throughout the day based on the five day parts we analyze as a business. This information is then available in a variety of formats and are e-mailed daily to our operations team. We have saved tens of thousands of dollars by being able to look at voids, comps, and promos by cashier and manager daily.
2. Polling - Aloha Enterprise is not just software it is a service. We have been using the AlohaFTP for polling as have seen our success rate climb to 99%.
3. Alerts -As the day evolves we have set-up alerts to page our District Managers (via Blackberry) with stores that are approaching overtime or down in sales against the forecasted number. You cannot imagine the savings this has produced for us. Imagine reacting that day to changing business conditions rather than discussing what went wrong at the weekly or monthly financial review with the COO.
4. Comparative same store sales information - not just sales data, but menu mix, check average, and day-part trends. This gets at the heart of under performing units and creates an easy action plan for managers to get back on track.
5. Menu mix information - by location, order mode, and day part. This is the only way to really track ROI for marketing promotions. We have made faster, better product decisions because of the accessibility we have to data at this detail level.

We have been using Enterprise so long I cannot imagine our company without it. Every team in our company uses it everyday in someway to better achieve our goals. As we grow the organization we have attracted talent from a lot of our restaurant companies. Those new team members always comment on the ease of use and wealth of information that Enterprise provides.

Charles R. Gray
Senior Director of Information Technology
Cosí Incorporated
New York, NY

To Whom It May Concern:

I would like to express my satisfaction with Aloha Technologies ASP solution: Aloha Enterprise.com.

We were very excited and anxious after signing the contract with Aloha to set the website up and begin polling data. It was a quick and seamless process that showed immediate results. Every question and concern was answered in a professional and timely manner, usually the same day if not immediately.

As our company continues to grow, the inter-store communication alone is worth the cost of implementation. We are no longer going through reams of paper in our fax machine, and sensitive material is kept from prying eyes. Sales data is updated every hour through our DSL connection, which keeps the District Managers and Owners apprised of current activity across hundreds of miles. Financial and collateral auditing of the restaurants is accomplished in just a few hours at a computer terminal anywhere, not days spent driving across town from location to location.

Our biggest undertaking will be Centralized Data Management and ADP Payroll integration. CDM will allow us to make global changes with just a few keystrokes as an alternative to traveling from store to store. New menus can be rolled out on the same day across the whole company. Our Human Resources department is looking forward to the day when they can download the period's payroll data from one location.

There are still areas for improvement for Aloha Enterprise.com. Several reports available from the POS haven't made their way onto the web, but they have been planned for the very near future. Every request for change that I have made has turned into an RFC to be implemented in the next version update, which occurs every few months, not years. The website is really developed by the users, not the programmers.

Aloha Enterprise.com is simply a great was to keep control of a growing company and use all of the technology available to the restaurant industry to keep costs low and profits high.

Best regards,

Daniel G. Kirk
Chief Technology Officer
J/B Restaurants, Inc.
Taco Mac, Tortilla Factory, Padriac's

Benefits of Using Enterprise.com

We have been using Aloha enterprise.com for over a year now in our Table Service restaurants and nearly a year in our Quick Service restaurants. The program has dramatically changed how we manage some parts of our business.

For example, each member of our regional staff now gets a daily email from the system that shows a brief daily report for each of his restaurants, including Sales, Labor, Voids, Discounts, menu item counts on important items, etc. Without enterprise.com, these regional managers would have never been able to get this information so quickly. Moreover, with our week ending on Tuesday, these regional managers get an alert every Sunday and Monday showing employees approaching overtime (39.5 hours). On Tuesday morning, they get alert messages showing who is already on overtime, so they can call the local managers and direct them to replace those people on the schedule. Since last year, we have cut overtime expense by $75,000 per month for each of the last 4 months (a 45% reduction in overtime expense!).

Another useful benefit is using the program to watch for fraud. By keeping an eye on the comp discount reports, one regional manager last week caught an employee stealing from us by abusing the discount functions. He was able to act quickly with this employee, potentially saving us hundreds of dollars. In the past year, we have used enterprise.com to identify at least a half-dozen cases of fraud. In addition, by watching the product mix reports, we were able to identify restaurants where the manager was ringing items on open food, which is against our policies, and another where the manager was running unauthorized 99 cent specials. (Our normal check average is over six dollars.)

The program is invaluable in tracking the success rate of food promotions, checking the redemption rate of coupons, category sales totals, daily labor reports, and more, and we get the data within 12 hours of EOD every day. It also helps us by warning us of system problems like full hard drive status, stores that didn't poll, and even stores that didn't settle their credit card batch.

With the information coming to the users so quickly, each regional person can more effectively and efficiently manage his stores from a distance. In the near future, we feel strongly that each regional person will be able to handle more stores, at least in part thanks to enterpris.com.

Mark A. Page
Restaurant Programs Manager
TravelCenters of America
Westlake Ohio

Mascott Corp. Inc.

Aloha Enterprise is a wonderful product/service which has become an integral part of the management and financial operations of our company. We now have all 14 of our restaurants on the system, and, as you know, we have one of the more difficult 14 unit operations to configure and maintain - we operate 2 table service and 4 quick service concepts. Nevertheless, everything has worked out great. Your group has always been speedy in resolving and issues that have arisen.

It would be very hard to calculate the financial benefit of Enterprise to our company, but there is no need to do such a calculation. The benefits far outweigh the costs. Every Executive and Manager now knows everything and anything about the numbers of each of our operations. We now know hourly sales, labor hours and dollars, comp detail, o/s detail and much more. We use current day polling so we get the information updated several times a day. The system truly keeps us in touch with all or our units.

We have configured our own daily flash report with the report builder. The report builder is a very nice tool and some of the coming enhancements sound great. The flash report allows all who need to know a daily recap of sales and labor with comparisons to last year. We have configured it to give us exactly the information we find important and nothing more. We can look at cover information and revenue center information, where relevant. Best of all, it is waiting in our e-mail every morning.

We have just completed the implementation of your ADP interface. I enjoyed being able to work with your group in fine tuning some of the elements of the interface to make it work as efficient as possible. We now import all of our pay data directly from Enterprise. This saves our payroll manager many hours every pay period. I am looking forward to next week"s updated release which will include an enterprise wide report containing all of the punch clock detail of all of our employees. The stores will no longer have to fax and overnight the hard copy to us.

We are also looking forward to the Mas90 General Ledger interface. It was great to be able to work with your group on developing this. We should be able to take a straight import from Enterprise into our G/L and bank rec system. Essentially, with this automation all we will have to do is execute the import and check our bank rec against our bank deposit reports. Everything else will flow automatically. Actually, even in the absence of the actual Enterprise interface, we have used your report writer to fashion a report that we import into excel every day. We manipulate the info a bit in excel and then import into Mas90. This alone has eliminated the need for stores to fax daily sales reports to the office and has made the entry of daily general ledger entries a 5 minute routine.

I could go on and on as to the benefits of Enterprise and I would be glad to share my thoughts with any perspective customer of yours. My simple endorsement would be the following:

If you own Aloha POS, RUN (don't walk) to get started with Aloha Enterprise. If you don't own Aloha POS, convert to Aloha POS and then RUN to get started with Aloha Enterprise.

Scott Gillman
Chief Executive Officer
Mascott Corporation, 908-436-1800