INTERACTIVE UNIX and Solaris Installed at Au Bon Pain

For example, the report tells the manager of the Au Bon Pain cafe in Cambridge's Harvard Square that in one week over 22,000 customers visited the premises, 5,500 of them before 11 a.m. They spent an average of $1.86 on breakfast, and croissants accounted for 22.58% of all products sold.

In the restaurants, the cash registers are linked to on-site PCs, which automatically draw in the day's sales and crunch the numbers through a customized application called AMIGO (Assisting Managers In Getting Out). Every night, a gateway PC running INTERACTIVE UNIX system software polls the restaurant PCs and collects the cash register-based data used to compile the report.

The Retail Operations Report software runs on a single Solaris-based SPARCstation 2 workstation with an Oracle database. After organizing and loading the store-processed data into the Oracle® database, the Solaris software passes the final figures to a pair of 486-based PCs running a Lotus report writer program. The report writer formats and produces the printed Retail Operations Reports.

Au Bon Pain designed the report software in conjunction with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Sapient Computing Corp., creating 30,000 lines of code in a five-month effort.

Au Bon Pain's MIS director Mark Factor recalls that "Before AMIGO, store managers were buried under a prodigious amount of paperwork. The advent of the in-store systems and AMIGO software helped the store managers, but only multiplied the information-tracking problems back at headquarters. The store data was ending up in literally 20 different places."

At that point, the company decided to create the Solaris-based central system in order to properly leverage the wealth of data being generated at each store. The goal of the project was to provide company executives and managers of individual stores with "every number they need to run the business."

"The response was very positive from the beginning, " says Factor. "In the first week, several managers called us to say how quickly they picked up key numbers from the new report and how they loved it. There's been a serious amount of excitement about this, both in the field and in our central office."

"The Retail Operations Report has changed our business," says Ronald Shaick, co-chairman and chief executive officer of the $68 million company. "Every manager and executive in the company gets everything they need to know in that one report, and that's hugely powerful. "By every Monday afternoon, company executives have in hand a highly detailed, customized report that summarizes data from 75 retail locations - figures on operations, profits, losses, marketing analytics and trends. Store managers get their copies early Tuesday morning.

The combination of store-based PC processing of register data, the INTERACTIVE UNIX-based gateway PC and the Solaris/SPARCstation corporate system platform gives Au Bon Pain a powerful and cost-effective way to leverage and distribute crucial information.

A glance at the weekly report, for example, can tell store managers if their food costs are in balance with actual sales figures. The report is continually updated with accurate current information from accounting and payroll as well as the store sales data.

"We've been able to track down people giving away food over the counter without charging for it," Factor said. "Now we can catch that kind of thing at the end of a week rather than the end of a month."

Each restaurant's profit can be affected by controllable variables everything from the amount of dough used to bake bread to the number of employees scheduled to work during peak hours. "It's essential that our store managers be able to plug the leaks from the bottom line," Factor comments.

Factor notes that other restaurant chains, such as Mrs. Field's, Inc., have spent up to $30,000 per store to set up host-based networks, whereas Au Bon Pain spent only $6,000 per store. The corporate end of the system costs about $35,000 for the Sun® workstation, an eight-node Ethernet network and other PC hardware. "The real action is out in our stores, and we are leveraging our PC investment by putting the initial processing out there," he says.

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