In 1999, two Taco Bell operators, fed up with endless reports, begged their bosses at their parent company, Border Foods, for a better way to analyze their data. Tech wizards inside the company developed Delaget, a software reporting solution, which proved so useful that Border spun it out a year later. Today the software-as-a-service vendor provides data analytics tools, including a just-announced platform for measuring delivery inputs, to more than 30,000 restaurants.
Back when Delaget was formed, finding a cockroach in the kitchen was what scared operators. What’s terrifying them today is something different: the prospect of having your delivery app turned off by someone other than yourself.
Rachel Auer, product manager at Delaget
“Delivery-service providers can turn off a store and operators often aren’t even aware of it,” said Rachel Auer, a product manager at Delaget, in an interview. “They don’t know what they don’t know.”
With Delaget they will know.
The company has designed a solution that can integrate into an operator’s operations and finance platforms. Instead of slogging through what Auer calls the spreadsheet Olympics, those endless documents the Taco Bell operators of yore griped about, Delaget offers easy-to-grasp insights through data visualization tools.
“Now you can jump on issues quickly and understand them rather than trying to decipher metrics that come in from different places,” Auer said.
And make no mistake, effectively managing your delivery operations has profound bottom-line implications. “The average QSR downtime is three and half hours per month,” Auer said, “but the bottom 5 percent are down 60 hours a month.” The company estimates that a QSR loses $24 an hour in sales when a delivery app is turned off.
An outage can happen for many reasons. A provider may shut off a location if it receives complaints from consumers or drivers. An employee may shut it off when the orders stack up. Maybe it’s a technical issue. Without tools at your disposal, it might be a mystery why a store goes dark. But once the closed-for-business clock starts ticking you can see margins evaporate quickly.
“We can not only tell you what is happening — whether it’s driver wait times or avoidable cancelations — but why it’s happening. We can help you look for thresholds and trends. We can make sure your POS and the DSP system are talking,” Auer said. “The goal is better margins.”
