http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/analpln/cs/charthse.htm (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
| Updated: March 14,1996 |  Go To TechNet Home Page |
Industry
Restaurant
Business Solution
Frequent-dining program and
customer service desk
Architecture
Visual Basic front-end applications on
PC workstations accessing a server running
Microsoft SQL Server and Windows NT Server
Products Used
Microsoft Access
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Mail
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft Visual Basic
Microsoft Windows® for Workgroups
Microsoft Windows NT Server
Microsoft Word
Benefit
Enhanced customer service; reduced costs
by $400,000 per year; increased incremental
sales by 8 percent
I
n the volatile restaurant business, keeping customers satisfied is a formidable challenge. But it is critical to success. For more than 30 years, Chart House Enterprises, Inc., has upheld a reputation for excellence at its upscale restaurants. The result: Chart House operates 65 restaurants across seven time zones and reports annual sales of $150 million.
Chart House management attributes much of its success to loyal customers. To reward their patronage, Chart House launched the Aloha Club Frequent Dining Program in October 1993. The program aims to drive incremental sales by increasing the average number of annual visits to the restaurant.
Figure 1
Because the program was experimental, Chart House turned to an outside fulfillment house for processing the membership applications and dining transactions. Everyday, all 65 restaurants had to overnight the membership applications
and dining transaction forms to the fulfillment house by courier. The data was then entered manually from the hard-copy forms into a minicomputer.
From the start, customer service problems plagued the project. Membership packets took 12 weeks to arrive, applications were lost, dining transactions were improperly credited because of illegible forms. Worse, customer service representatives answering Chart House's toll-free number had no access to customer data because it resided on the fulfillment house's minicomputer. To respond to a customer inquiry, they had to fax a request to the fulfillment house and waitoften two or three daysfor a response. John Townsend, Director of Information Services for Chart House, explains, "In those situations where we had customer service problems, we dida disservice to customers, probably driving them away from the restaurant rather than encouraging them to come in more often."
The Aloha Club problems put Chart House at risk of losing their biggest competitive advantage: excellent, personalized customer service. Consequently, Chart House decided in March 1994 to redesign the Aloha Club completely. To assist in the design and development, Chart House turned to WinResources Computing, Inc., a San Diego-based Microsoft Solution Provider. "Time was critical," explains Bob Karp, President of WinResources. "Chart House management realized that the success of the program would be jeopardized if we didn't move quickly, because customer satisfaction with the program was very low."
Re-engineering the Business Process
In less than a month, WinResources completed the requirements analysis and suggested a complete redesign of the system. They identified four key objectives: improve access to the data; develop a system that could easily integrate with future accounting and point-of-sales applications; create an integrated reporting and analysis process; and minimize training costs.
Because Chart House had already installed COMPAQ® 486/66 computers running Microsoft Office Professional and a Visual Basic®-based menu application at the restaurants, WinResources suggested a Windows NTTM-based client-server solution. The Windows NTTM Server operating system offered 32-bit processing for speed and capacity, along with the data security, reliability, and administrative features found on many high-end minicomputers. It also offered the same Windows®-based application programming interfaces (APIs) on both the client and server, which meant that Chart House developers wouldn't have to learn two sets of APIs to develop applications. Because Chart House wanted to keep development, training, and administration time to a minimum, Windows NT Server offered the best of both worlds: reliability and performance with familiarity and ease of use.
Chart House then evaluated Microsoft SQL ServerTM for membership transaction processing. Because of the scalability of Microsoft SQL Server and the relatively low cost of the hardware and software, Chart House decided to get Microsoft SQL Server and a COMPAQ ProLiant Dual PentiumTM 90-MHz computer with 128 MB of memory and seven 1-gigabyte hard disks to run the Aloha Club database. The 300-MB Aloha Club database contains 225,000 member records and more than 500,000 dining transactions.
At the time of the Aloha Club system evaluation, Chart House was also making plans to migrate all the company's data from an in-house Honeywell Bull minicomputer to a central server by the end of 1995. To accommodate the company's mission-critical applications, Chart House needed a powerful and secure relational database management system. "With symmetric multi-processing support and 32-bit capacity and performance, Microsoft SQL Server provided us with the right combination of power and flexibility," says Townsend.
By the end of 1995, Chart House expects to migrate all the company's accounting and financial data from the Honeywell system to Microsoft SQL Server. And Townsend expects no degradation in server performance. Townsend points out the advantage of scalability: "By taking the approach we did, we didn't have to make a huge investment upfront. It's much easier to invest in a $15,000 server than a quarter-million-dollar minicomputer."
After Chart House finalized the decision to build the back end with products from Microsoft BackOffice, WinResources had to determine what development tools to use. After briefly examining PowerBuilderTM, Chart House and WinResources chose to develop with the Visual Basic programming system and Microsoft Access. "Chart House realized that having a development tools strategy is very important. It wanted to leverage what it already knew and it wanted to develop applications across the corporation using a standard set of tools. It also wanted to take advantage of reusable components, including VBX controls and, in the future, OLE controls," says Karp.
Assigning one part-time and two full-time developers to the project in April 1994, WinResources identified five major development modules of the new system: entry of new member applications, entry of restaurant dining transactions, posting and exceptions reporting, executive information system, and the customer service desk. The first development module entailed moving the entry of new member applications from its central location to the individual restaurants. Instead of sending membership applications to a central location for data entry, staff members at each restaurant now enter the applications daily into a local Microsoft Access database. To input the data, the restaurant staff uses a membership application developed in Visual Basic. The application data is then extracted from the Microsoft Access database into a text file, sent by modem to a telecommunications server at Chart House headquarters, and posted to the Microsoft SQL Server database. Before the data is processed, Microsoft SQL Server performs exception reporting and error checking.
The new procedure eliminated courier costs, reduced the time needed to enter member information and required almost no training. As Karp points out, "The restaurants were already using our Visual Basic menu application, so we were able to leverage what they already knew. That is one of the nice things about Microsoft technology. We were able to develop an application that looked and acted a lot like the other applications they had on the desktop, thus minimizing training."
To improve the data reliability, magnetic strip readers now enter dining transactions electronically at
Figure 2
the restaurant. Each member has an Aloha Club card that is put through the reader at the time of purchase. Dining-transaction data is batch uploaded nightly to a telecommunications server at headquarters before being posted to the Microsoft SQL Server database. Chart House has virtually eliminated dining-transaction errors using stored procedures to enforce business rules built into the database. For example, the data is checked for transactions under $10, which do not qualify for Aloha Club credit.
The third module of the system-a Visual Basic posting routine-was developed for use on both membership and dining-transaction data. Data from the telecommunications server is posted to the Microsoft SQL Server database. During posting, Microsoft SQL Server performs exception reporting. In many database systems, exceptions are simply written to a log. By taking advantage of Microsoft SQL Server's mail-enabled extended stored procedures, WinResources was able to integrate the exception-reporting system with electronic mail. As Karp explains, "We developed a Visual Basic program that finds transactions of closed accounts, automatically creates a Word customer letter using OLE Automation, merges the account data from the SQL Server database into the letter using mail merge, and automatically sends the letter via Microsoft Mail to the administrator. The letter notifying the customer of his closed account is then immediately sent out. All this with only a few lines of Visual Basic and five lines of WordBasic."
Management reporting was another critical component of the new system. Chart House management wanted to track the activity of the Aloha Club Program and perform financial analysis. To develop the activity reports, WinResources used Microsoft Access. Because users at Chart House were already familiar with Microsoft Access, they can now modify the existing reports and develop new reports on their own. To perform the financial analysis, WinResources developed an executive information system in Visual Basic, Applications Edition, using Microsoft Excel PivotTable® technology, which enables Chart House management to bring in the data from the Microsoft SQL Server database and examine it from a "bottom-line" perspective. "With the new EIS system, our executives can now effectively assess the financial performance of the Aloha Club Program," says Townsend.
To improve Aloha Club member satisfaction, customer service was completely redesigned. After defining the new parameters, the developers created a "customer service desktop" in Visual Basic. Using standard data-aware controls included with the Visual Basic database engine, they readily created an easy-to-use front end to the Microsoft SQL Server database. The new interface allows customer service representatives to get the data they need in a matter of seconds and respond immediately to members' inquires.
As soon as development was completed, WinResources began the conversion from the minicomputer at the fulfillment house to Microsoft SQL Server. According to Townsend, Microsoft SQL Server's easy-to-use administration tools made the migration relatively painless. The conversion of the 225,000 membership records from the minicomputer onto the Microsoft SQL Server database was done in just two days.
Aloha Club Increases Sales
The new Aloha Club system was fully deployed July 6, 1994, two months ahead of schedule. Since then, member satisfaction has improved dramatically. Time to deliver membership packets has decreased by 70 percent, and members get answers to their inquires in a few seconds rather than a few days. Furthermore, the dining-transaction information is accurate and timely. As a result, members have shown their satisfaction by returning to the restaurant more often. "Using the Microsoft Excel incremental sales PivotTable, we have tracked an 8 percent increase in sales, thanks to the Aloha Club," says Townsend.
Aloha Club members are not the only satisfied customers-Chart House management is also pleased with the new system. By using powerful component technology, WinResources was able to exceed Chart House's expectations. The entire system, including hardware, was developed in less than four months for a cost of $170,000. Chart House now has immediate access to data, powerful analysis and reporting tools, and improved data integrity. Furthermore, the new system enables Chart House to do database marketing and co-marketing with American Express.
Chart House is also saving money. The fulfillment house fees, courier and fax bills, and costs of correcting data-entry mistakes added up to a hefty sum. Before moving the Aloha Club Program in house, Chart House was spending over $750,000 a year to maintain the program. Maintenance costs are now minimal, and Chart House expects to save approximately $400,000 a year using the new system.
The Aloha Club is just a beginning for Chart House; technology will play an increasingly important role in how Chart House does business. Later this year, Chart House plans to deploy a Windows-based point-of-sale system from Hospitality Systems. And by the end of 1995, Chart House hopes to have moved all the company's accounting data from the Honeywell Bull system to Microsoft SQL Server. Townsend confirms, "Our strategic decision to establish the Microsoft family of development tools as our corporate standard continues to fulfill our need to rapidly deploy scalable, competitive applications."
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Customer Support Centre at (800) 563-9048. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To contact WinResources, call (619) 689-1200.
© 1995 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Microsoft, PivotTable, Visual Basic, and Windows are registered trademarks and Windows NT is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. COMPAQ is a registered trademark of Compaq Computer Corporation. Pentium is a trademark of Intel Corporation. PowerBuilder is a trademark of Powersoft Corporation.
Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052-6399
0295 Part No. 098-58437 (printed document)
 |
Click Here to Search TechNet Web Contents | TechNet CD Overview | |
Microsoft TechNet Credit Card Order Form At this time we can only support electronic orders in the US and Canada. International ordering information. |
| Go To TechNet Home Page |
©1996 Microsoft Corporation |  Go To Microsoft Home Page |