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CrunchTime!'s Web-based system keeps small restaurant chain up-to-speed with technology
By H. Rae Gibbons
August, 2001
The founders of Souper Salad, a small chain of restaurants located primarily in the Boston area, conceptualized a menu 25 years ago that consists of homemade soups and freshly baked muffins, with a focus on quality and freshness. The parent company is Fresh Concepts, and in 1997 they introduced another restaurant division to the Boston area, Fresh City, with a menu that focuses on salad wraps, sandwiches, Asian noodles, Cookin' Wraps (hot tortilla wrap sandwiches), a smoothie and juice bar, Java City coffee and espresso drinks and a bakery.
A lot of prep-work goes into ensuring that the food for each division is served fresh every day - Souper Salad and Fresh City share their own Culinary Center devoted to this goal. At the Culinary Center, more than 200 gallons of soup, 80 gallons of salad dressing and 2,000 muffins are prepared each day to serve the more than 60,000 customers that visit both Souper Salad or Fresh City locations each week.
In order to find a system that would help them control their food costs and automate purchasing and inventory management, Fresh Concepts outsourced the search to a Md.-based consulting company called CynterCon Technology Advisors. CynterCon evaluated possible companies and presented Fresh Concepts with the three companies that were the best fit for their operation. After interviewing all three, CrunchTime! Information Systems' Net-Chef product was the one that the executives at Fresh Concepts liked the best. A major factor in their decision was that CrunchTime! is a Web-based system, and not a software program that can eventually become obsolete.
All of the Souper Salad and Fresh City stores are using CrunchTime!'s Net-Chef, which allows store managers to control inventory, order products, reconcile orders, scale recipes, analyze menus, plan production, enter sales transactions, upload/download files (operating procedures, HR forms, etc.) and run store level reports.
CrunchTime!'s Enterprise Manager product is used at the Fresh Concepts corporate office, as well as at Fresh Concept's commissary, from which much of the ordering is done. The Enterprise Manager is a three-tier, client/server food and beverage back office system. CrunchTime! hosts Enterprise Manager and Net-Chef at their corporate data center in Boston in return for an initial up-front cost, followed by a pre-determined monthly fee for the service. Because the solution is hosted entirely off site, Souper Salad has no servers to maintain in order to use the application - The corporate office is where all the configuration of the application is done in Enterprise Manager, and the managers at the store level simply process transactions.
Y2K OK
Fresh Concepts began looking for a system because their previous system was an in-house, homemade system that wasn't Y2K compatible. In November 1999, Fresh Concepts began the roll-out of Net-Chef in all the restaurants at once to protect themselves from the Y2K bug. Tom Clancy, the vice president of operations for Fresh Concepts, says, "We had meetings so that [the people from CrunchTime!] could learn everything about our company and get all our information entered into the system. Once that was achieved, they had to go back and write a program that was customized to our operation. Then the program had to be installed and we needed to be trained in order to train our managers."
Clancy adds that it wasn't long before everyone was settled into the system, and realizing the benefits. "Any time you're changing to a new system, there are certainly kinks in the armor. Everything didn't go 100 percent smoothly at first, but by April 2000, we were able to work everything out. It has turned out to be a very successful product on our end. We've been able to decrease the food cost across the board by more than one percent."
Clancy believes that the success they have recently experienced with the reduction of food costs has everything to do with using the Net-Chef product. He adds that three factors have been drivers in reducing food cost:
- "This system has made our managers better purchasers because they purchase through the Net-Chef system",
- "It has kept a better control on our inventories and par levels" and
- "It has kept a better control on our purveyors and their pricing structures. Invoices can be reconciled versus what was purchased so we can ensure that the purchasing price that was agreed upon between us and the vendor is adhered to."
Operation-specific solution
CrunchTime! has had to customize several functions for the Souper Salad restaurants because they do a lot of ordering through a commissary and because catering is a large part of their business. Clancy says that CrunchTime! had not dealt with a client that ordered through a commissary until Souper Salad, and they had approximately 5,000 recipes that had to be set up in the system to enable them to compute correctly for the commissary.
On the catering side, CrunchTime! customized several catering-specific reports for Souper Salad such as one that gives a history of their more than 5,000 catering accounts and monitors those accounts on a daily, weekly and monthly basis so that the activity on each account can be easily accessed and viewed.
Clancy says that Net-Chef's additional reporting capabilities allow them to report on just about anything they can think of. "We run a daily data report where we can collect data from the restaurant at the corporate office, such as sales, labor, item count, credit card purchases, over/shorts and all the previous day's data from the restaurant to be used for purchasing. Additionally, store managers can print up all their inventories, all their end-of-month reports, food cost reports, etc., and report those to the corporate office. We also use Net-Chef on a weekly basis as a payroll system, so our payroll clerk at the corporate office can gather all the necessary data from the store electronically."
Effortless upgrades
Because CrunchTime! is a software company that provides Web-based applications, it enables its users to take advantage of upgrades to the applications without having to purchase a new product. "One of the factors that attracted us to [CrunchTime!'s solution.] was that it is a Web-based system. The fact that they didn't have to download software at every single restaurant, and that the software wouldn't become obsolete quickly, helped lead to our decision to go with CrunchTime!, comments Clancy."
Clancy adds that CrunchTime! shares the experience of its clients across their customer list as well, and that when other clients request custom solutions, CrunchTime! often offers the improved features to Fresh Concepts as well. Clancy adds, "Using a Web-based application keeps you closer to the cutting edge."
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