Tag Archives: Huntington Beach

BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse, a restaurant chain based in Huntington Beach, Calif. opened in 1978 with one restaurant but has grown rapidly and now has 82 restaurants scattered throughout the South, Southwest and Midwest. Brian Pearson, vice president of information services, tells IncTechnology.com that a network automation server helped the restaurant change menu prices across the company in 15 minutes – as opposed to six hours. Elizabeth Wasserman: What type of IT services do you provide to restaurants in your chain? Brian Pearson: When I arrived here about five years ago, we had 28 restaurants. Our growth has been pretty dramatic since then. We have a management team here that has a fundamental belief in the ability of technology to accelerate your business practices. We look for every opportunity to accelerate things with the use of technology. In the restaurants, we have a point of sale system and a kitchen display system, which is kind of the point of sale system in the back of the house. Instead of the kitchen receiving a ticket on a printer, we send them information on touch screens and do what’s called coursing, which is a more efficient way for each section of the kitchen to receive orders. We also have a table management system. There are two major components — there is this computer up at the host stand with the floor layout, and the other big component is integrated with other IT systems. One of the jobs of the host is to roam around the floor and give updates on the table status, whether they are empty or dirty or whether someone has their check. Wasserman: When you started with BJ’s, were you able to perform business processes across the chain? Pearson: We were running each restaurant as an individual. Any time we wanted to update a price on the menu, we had to dial in using remote software to each individual restaurant for every activity we were performing. Let’s say we had to do it 28 times. There is no scale in that model. You can’t take the business beyond 25 or 30 restaurants before seeing an impact on general and administrative overhead. Wasserman: So what did you decide to do? Pearson: One of my mandates going forward was to make this a scalable environment. The new management sees this as being a 300-plus unit chain. When you’re given that mandate and you only have 28 restaurants, that’s a pretty big job. We set out looking at automated tool sets. Several companies had similar tool sets that provide some measure of automation, but nothing that would allow me to change it as our needs changed. We tried half a dozen products. We came across Network Automation’s BPA Server and were blown away immediately by how versatile it was. It has its fingers in everything we do from a technology standpoint. Today we have over 200 tasks, we use to execute everything from the installation of a new system to changing prices on the menu, to grabbing the day’s sale and labor figures. Wasserman: What have the results been? Pearson: We can do more with fewer people. I would estimate that it’s probably saved us by doing the jobs of five people, although it could be more than that. You’re automating this activity hundreds of times, where before you had to do it each time individually. I don’t know if you remember, when the “I love you” virus hit, we had to shut down a service on every one of our computers companywide. That was 17 terminals per restaurant and 100 computes at the main office. Inside of 15 minutes we had written the code and deployed it companywide. It took me at one point six hours to change all the menu prices companywide. That was when we only had 28 restaurants. Now it takes us 15 minutes.