Food Services Company Automates Budgeting and Planning Using Power BI
Overview
This fast casual restaurant company operates over 150 restaurants in twelve states. They are a licensed franchisee of a popular deli restaurant chain, and its restaurants offer a variety of made-to-order sandwiches, salads, soups, and other items.
Challenges
The company was experiencing fast growth that led to challenges in managing increasingly complex budgeting and planning processes, so they needed to automate. Location managers use Power BI for reporting and analytics, but it lacks the native ability to capture budget data. As a result, finance managers were spending a significant amount of time and effort using Excel files to collect data from the 120 individual locations, creating reports, and performing critical calculations.
dF Solution Statement/Results
deFacto Power Planning was used to instantly automate the company’s budgeting and planning processes by taking advantage of its Power BI write-back enabled Custom Visual. This allowed location managers to submit data via the Power BI Custom Visual subjected to the company-specific allocation rules for specific accounting, sales, and labor figures defined in the application. The new application introduced ad-hoc testing and what-if budgeting scenarios, allowing effective planning for different scenarios.
deFacto Power Planning redefined the company’s budgeting and planning processes, enabling them to achieve highly accurate results with minimal effort. These enhancements brought about significant improvements in productivity and efficiency across the organization, with a 95% reduction in the overall budgeting process time.