Tech Talk: Restaurant Betters Database Access

By Elizabeth Wasserman

A chain of seafood restaurants in Florida found that by deploying new software managers could better use different databases to increase productivity and keep expenses at a minimum.

Crabby Bills, a chain of seven seafood restaurants headquartered in Indian Rocks Head, Fla., wanted some of its 400 employees to more easily tap into and work with data essential to restaurant operations stored in two SQL databases. Chief information Officer Luis Campuzano tells IncTechnology how new software helped the restaurant improve productivity and keep expenses down.

Elizabeth Wasserman: How does Crabby Bills use database technology?

Luis Campuzano: The main thing is we have two separate databases. One is for our restaurants. That data comes from point of sale, labor information, daily sales, and check information. The other is for our accounting system. The sales data would feed over into the accounting side. We wanted to be able to have one place to go at the restaurants for the manager to be able to combine everything in a usable interface. That's what we were looking for.

Wasserman: So what did you do about this problem?

Campuzano: There are a couple of different solutions out there. We were originally looking at developing something in Microsoft .net. But we needed something we could put together pretty quickly. We know about FileMaker Pro for a while, but when they came out with version 9, with a SQL back end, we realized we could pretty quickly build a front end and combine our two databases. It's probably been up for about five months now. To do the initial front end took about a day. It really goes quickly. We've been tweaking it since then.

Wasserman: What does this allow you to do now?

Campuzano: A lot of the different restaurants call me up and they want to add a screen or a different function. I can create it pretty quickly with the connections. It's a lot easier to put the data out there in a quick fashion. They can use it to go in there and track orders. They can compare how much they spent in dollars to how much they made. All the labor information is now accessible at the store level and they can view the data all in one spot. We're all able to look at the same reports, same screens, at all our different locations. It used to be that with two systems at one time, we might have discrepancies. Now we're able to view both at one time and make edits on the same screen. We used to have to go to two different places to go to find sales information and payroll information. It's now a little less confusing for the restaurant managers.