Domino’s Pizza
Company: ComshareCustomer: Domino’s PizzaSubmitted by: ComshareDomino’s Pizza, the world’s leading pizza delivery company and largest privately held restaurant chain, chose Comshare DecisionWeb as the best decision support solution for helping the company’s executive, regional, and field marketing managers navigate daily point-of-sale data. The data is accessed from an Informix data warehouse using Microsoft’s SQL Server 7.0 OLAP Services.Founded in 1960, Domino’s retail sales exceeded £1.8 billion in 1998, with 1700 franchises operating more than 6,000 stores throughout the US and 65 international markets. Supporting end user information needs has been challenging.
“Domino’s Pizza has used decision support for over five years,” says George Azrak, Vice President, Information Systems Deveiopment for Domino’s Pizza. “We’ve assembled an impressive arsenal of tools to help us manage our business. However, they are not for everyone. Our ‘power users’ praise some of the technology, but it can be overwhelming to other users. My responsibility, from an IS perspective, is to engage those other users while using existing resources.
With that goal, the IS team presented users with vendors that had an easy-to-use interface, and a back-end that was compatible with our relational data warehouse.”
The solution
“Domino’s marketing team felt most comfortable with Comshare’s solution,” says Azrak, “and Comshare’s open architecture allowed us to use Comshare DecisionWeb with Microsoft’s SQL Server 7.0 OLAP Services sitting on top of our Informix data warehouse.
We have about 150 gigabytes of data. We felt that the whole information supply chain would work well – from point of sale to delivery of the information to the desktops of our marketing managers and executives.”Comshare’s considerable experience as the innovator in management planning and control applications for more than 30 years entered into the decision. “Comshare, unlike the other vendors, approached the problem from a functional standpoint rather than a technical one. They looked at what our users needed before offering a technology solution,” confirms Azrak.
“We felt comfortable with Comshare representatives who then asked themselves, ‘What technology can we bring to the table to fix these functional problems? The other vendors took a different approach. They’d say, ‘Boy this is slick technology! Now, let’s look at what problems it can solve.”
The benefits
Comshare’s Web-architected application serves multiple users, keeping even remote users in touch with the information they need. Users work directly with business information for ad-hoc reporting and develop applications using advanced data visualisation and data mining techniques via Java-enabled browsers. This Web solution offers a low-maintenance alternative to traditional client/server-only applications including the ability to write back to the central database, charting, and intuitive drill-down.
“The rich functionality of Comshare’s Web interface will allow us to provide consistent delivery whether the user is at our headquarters, in one of our regional offices, in our international offices, or on the road,” continues Azrak.”Comshare gives us a lot of flexibility to tailor the system for an executive, middle manager, heavy-duty analyst, and even a user who is just looking for some packaged information – we can serve all our users,” says Azrak. “And Comshare’s data visualisation techniques for detecting hidden problems in operational data are a big hit with our users. We definitely like what Comshare has done using these techniques to help guide users to information they need to act upon. Comshare is another weapon in our arsenal that’s going to open our data to a new class of users that we have not reached before.”
