Mitchells & Butlers Customer Spotlight

Mitchells & Butlers

“With Data Integrator, we are delivering business benefit by enhancing information availability throughout the company in whatever timeframe is needed - whether historical, trend, monthly, daily, or even in real time.”

Stewart Walker, IT director, Mitchells & Butlers

Challenge

In business since 1898, Mitchells & Butlers now manages over 2,000 pubs, bars, and restaurants in the United Kingdom and Germany. The company has grown organically with the creation of market-leading brands such as All Bar One, Vintage Inns, Toby Carvery, Edward's, O'Neill's, and Scream, as well as through successful acquisitions of Harvester Restaurants and Browns. Like many organizations, Mitchells & Butlers stores its information in a central data warehouse. Also like many organizations, it has a number of different technology systems installed across all of its operations. These are not necessarily integrated and, until recently, the process of transferring data between multiple applications and moving it to its central data warehouse was resource-intensive and time-consuming.

Approach

In the fiercely competitive pub and restaurant business, it's important to ensure brand quality, consistency, and compliance. And part of doing this requires timely access to accurate information across the business. With this in mind, as well as the intent to maintain its prominent place in the market, Mitchells & Butlers decided to add a new dimension to its IT systems. It chose to implement business intelligence (BI) software from Business Objects to access, analyze, and share up-to-date information that underpins both day-to-day management and strategic understanding of brand performance.

Results

The recent implementation of BusinessObjects™ Data Integrator has significantly sped the process of integrating data across multiple systems and into the data warehouse. According to Paul Tomkinson, integration manager at Mitchells & Butlers, “We wanted a consistent and automated method for data integration. The adoption of Data Integrator has delivered significant productivity improvements. We are now able to move data four to six times faster. In addition to the speed and efficiency, the ease of maintenance and reuse is a major benefit.” These capabilities are supporting the increased demand from the business for fast access to actionable business information. Stewart Walker, IT director for Mitchells & Butlers, says, "With Data Integrator, we are delivering business benefit by enhancing information availability throughout the company in whatever timeframe is needed-whether historical, trend, monthly, daily, or even in real time.”

In addition, with Business Objects query and reporting tools, users can access and manage this information themselves. As a result, there has been a significant increase in demand from users across the company for access to information.”

Mitchells & Butlers also used Data Integrator during its recent deployment of PeopleSoft HR to rapidly move historical data from the old system, ensuring immediate access to all the information from day one of the system going live. "Using our old manual-based approach, this process would have taken 400 work days and we could not have achieved it on time," says Tomkinson. "Using Data Integrator, the process took only 50 work days which equates to an eight-fold increase in productivity."

What's more, the organization is also planning to use the web services capability within Data Integrator to support retail estate management by tracking the value of properties within the portfolio. Using Data Integrator, Mitchells & Butlers will gather information from an extranet used by its construction division to build a complete picture of each property available from one central source. The real estate department will then use this to classify outlets, monitor their state of repair, and, by combining this information with demographic data, support rebranding and new outlet decisions. "The use of Data Integrator will be a key enabler in delivering this application within a specific cost and time limit, and we expect 100% return on investment (ROI) within one year," adds Walker.

In addition to using Business Objects software to analyze and report on data within its finance, marketing, risk and compliance, human resources, and regional management departments, Mitchells & Butlers plans to use BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager to develop management dashboard applications. These dashboards will support regional managers by allowing them to monitor company performance and alerting them quickly to any problem areas that need resolution.

According to Tomkinson, "As regional managers take on extra responsibility, it is essential that they have visibility of day-to-day operational performance in each of the outlets they manage and understand how that impacts overall strategic corporate goals. Dashboards will deliver the relevant information they need in a simple format, enabling them to spend less time analyzing information and more time on the road visiting outlets.”

Finally, Mitchells & Butlers are using professional services from Business Objects to maximize the success of its BI initiatives with the use of best practices. These services include architecture design, development, skills transfer, and best-practice guides for future projects. As Walker concludes, "Our goal is to standardize on one business intelligence product suite. With Business Objects, we now have one integrated solution that handles data integration, reporting, and analytics. This single dynamic view of our business will help us to achieve operational excellence and maintain leadership in a competitive industry."