Management Information System

Sponsoring Organization:

RESTAURANT BRANDS NZ

60 Hugo Johnston Drive, Penrose

Auckland

Project Supervisor:

Ian Howard

Email:

ianh@ie3.co.nz

Project Members

Kartik Kandukurti

Sailesh Pradhan

Akshay Chadha

Email:

kkan011@ec.auckland.ac.nz

Restaurant Brands New Zealand Limited operates the New Zealand outlets of KFC, Pizza Hut and Starbucks Coffee. Across these three high profile brands, RBNZ operates 201 stores throughout the length of New Zealand with a net profit after tax and abnormals for the year to 30 November 2001 of $12.1 million. These food brands – three of the world’s most famous – are distinguished not only for their product but also for the look, style and ambience of their outlets, for the service they provide, and for the total experience they deliver to their customers in New Zealand and around the world.
The company’s undoubted success with these notable brands, matching anything else in the world, is based on its proven abilities in five essential and inter-related management disciplines:

Restaurant Brands’ core competency is taking the expertise and systems of its brand franchisers and applying it locally, to deliver both the food and the total experience on a consistent basis across the company.

It is in the marshalling of these systems – the careful and intelligent procurement of quality ingredients, the efficient distribution to and through three retail networks, the employment of advanced tracking technology to meticulously track and report on costs, sales, margins and replenishment – that the company maximizes its diverse skills for the profitable management of brands and company.

All RBNZ stores have a Front of house System (FOH) and a Back of house System (BOH) in place. FOH system is the Register system that deals with the recording of sales transactions from customers. ARMS(Automated Restaurant Management System) supplied by Tricon International USA is the store Back of house system for all RBNZ stores. It is a DOS based system which manages stock ordering , rostering and inventory control. ARMS (BOH) receive data from FOH system at the end of each business day.

The RBNZ head office uses SDC (Store Data Consolidation) supplied by Tricon International USA as the database for store ARMS generated data. SDC holds all store data and some support center generated data. SDC also has the masters for the store ARMS systems including inventory, menu items, recipes.

Reporting of the information stored in the SDC database is all done using Access with ODBC link direct to source.

Around 2am – 5am every morning, SDC picks up the files from the store ARMS system using MLink which is a store polling software supplied by Computer Associates NZ LTD. Updates on inventory, menu items and recipes are fed back out to the stores from SDC via Mlink.

The Citrix Server, which runs Citrix Metaframe facilitates remote users by providing them network access into the Informix database. The Server has a public IP address for access through firewall. Area Managers are provided with a thin-client application. They are able to view various reports by logging on to the Citrix Server which gives them access to the Informix database.

RBNZ’s proposed student project for 2002 is focused on reviewing existing management information systems and implementing solutions to enhance the processing and reporting of this information.

Data files from each of the outlets of RBNZ are captured by the Head Office on a daily basis, where they are processed and stored in a centralized database. Reports are generated by extracting the required data from the database using MS Access. As a result, once a report is generated, the user has no option to get any further details or get different views of the report.

The first stage of the project involves enhancing this report generation process of the current management information system by providing additional tools such as pivot tables, data cubes and a more sophisticated user interface. This will enable the users to build useful views of data to aid in reporting process, with a wider perspective than with existing system.

The second stage involves development of an intranet, development of a web front end into the proposed reporting. Users will be able to access the reports directly from the SDC in Head Office instead of getting screenshots of reports through a Citrix thin client. This will be useful in management, both in terms of reporting and auditing.

The proposed system will be developed as a stand-alone module that can integrate with the central database and provide the necessary enhancements in the report generation process.

The proposed system involves designing and implementing a data mart, and then developing a web-based reporting application. It takes the form of a 3-tier application.

Firstly, the information needed to be stored in the datamart has to be identified. Then this information is extracted from the current database and then inserted into the datamart. This database resides on a database server.

The next task is to design and implement a web application for RBNZ’s MIS that interacts with the data mart and provides users with customized reports and additional functionalities to perform further drill down operations on the reports.This would enable users to access corporate data over the local intranet with just the normal Internet browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator).

Finally, this web application is installed on RBNZ’s application server. For security purposes, the server is configured to regulate access by defining authorized users of the system.

By enhancing the current MIS at RBNZ, the business is going to own a more sophisticated reporting system rich in design and functionalities. Greater availability will result from the proposed system as the web application will be easily accessible from anywhere over the Internet via a simple web browser (MSIE and Netscape). This also means that the new system will be platform independent ( i.e. regardless of what OS a machine is running)

The proposed system will also provide faster access to the information required.

The users of the enhanced version of MIS will get to experience a more attractive, easy to use and feature-rich user interface with minimum training involved thereby saving the business time and money.

This phase is estimated to take up around 4 weeks. It involves the following tasks:

This is when we recommend a solution to RBNZ that we think will suit the most. We plan to complete this stage in around 2 weeks.

This is the most time consuming phase in our project. It is estimated to take up at least 4 months and involves the following key tasks: