TaholaCloud has entered the life of Pie

We are delighted to share that we have recently implemented our game changing SaaS based business analytics solution TaholaCloud, across 15 Pieminister sites in the UK.

Pieminister was founded by Jon Simon and Tristan Hogg in 2003. Inspired by the delicious ‘Aussie’ pies whilst on their travels around Australia, they decided that on their return to the UK they would set up shop in Stokes Croft, Bristol and its there that Pieminister was born.

Their vision was to create a range of pies ‘‘made with fine ingredients, that you can see, taste and smell’. This vision has helped them revolutionise the British pie industry to become Britain’s most trusted pie brand, still making all of their pies in the same Bristol Kitchens where their Pie Journey began.

Pieminister has seen significant growth over the last five years and now the organisation, not only operates restaurants and cafes, their lines are also available nationwide across your favourite supermarkets. 

In light of this growth, Pieminister recently got to the point where they realised that they needed a solution to help analyse their data, they knew that technology had an integral part to play in how the business would grow, and that investment in the right technology could truly revolutionise how the company viewed and acted upon their data.

As a food manufacturer the processes at Pieminister are far more complicated than a typical restaurant. When we initially engaged with them, they had so much data, but couldn't analyse it quick enough to support their decision making. So they came to us and made the decision to adopt TaholaCloud, a solution that could be implemented quickly, whilst also ensuring it was truly fit for purpose to meet their specific business needs.

The main challenge faced by Pieminister was to find a more efficient way of managing a lot of data in one place. They wanted to get a better understanding of their labour, sales and food costs, whilst also taking into consideration the added dimension of delivery, it was a real challenge establishing if they were actually making any money from it or not. However, since implementing TaholaCloud Pieminister can now split the seating areas, meaning that they now have a view of; seating, takeaways and delivery in isolation, but can easily pull them all back together again to look at the overall picture.

Pieminsiter’s budgets were tied into multiple spreadsheet formats. TaholaCloud has enabled all restaurant numbers and performance data to be viewed in one place and more importantly at the click of a button. TaholaCloud has eradicated around 9 different workbooks in one go and significantly reduced the time spent on collating reports, so much so that the financial assistant now spends far more time analysing data, rather than collating it, bringing further value to the business.

TaholaCloud is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) based analytics solution, that manages key business drivers, and provides insight and intelligence without the cost and complexity of traditional approaches to Business Analytics solutions. It enables multi-site operators like Pieminister to make faster and more informed decisions in a cost effective way.

TaholaCloud provides Pieminister with the ability to monitor and control their business on any device in any location, giving them the ability to track KPIs and drill down to transaction level detail, ensuring the information required is available and up to date any time of day or night.

An accurate forecast to ensure any hospitality organisation runs smoothly is essential. If you don't know what you’re likely to sell, how can you possibly predict the staff and products you’ll need?

Formulating an accurate forecast enables you to look at a variety of data sets, not just what happened the previous week.

By integrating TaholaCloud with a number of Pieminister’s data sources we have been able to maximise the insight and intelligence that can be uncovered to ensure they have access to the right data sets, providing more accurate and efficient reporting to be produced at the click of a button.

General Managers can then overlay their knowledge to forecast, ensuring that they know, what and who they need, where and when. This not only allows them to satisfy demand, but also helps to take advantage of new sales opportunities.

“As a GM it’s really important for me that I can see what everyone else is doing and how they are performing. Being competitive myself, I also like to know how I’m doing compared to other GMs and sites. It used take so much more time to collate the data to encourage that competitive spirit between sites and we used to have to manually create and monitor competitions. Whereas now, with TaholaCloud if you want to look at who has sold the most deserts on a specific date for example, you can literally get the figures at the click of a button.

One of my waitresses has taken 21% of last months takings so far on her own, and she was amazed at how I even knew that. It really is very interesting from a GMs perspective, because I can now see who is performing well, where their may be a need for additional training and where someone might just simply be slacking”.

TaholaCloud is currently integrated with Pieminister’s EPOS solution (IBS Stocklink), enabling them to really see whats happening on the floor. Every transaction is reflected in their sales data, including every void, upsell, profitable and unprofitable time slots and every discount

TaholaCloud brings all of their sales data together so they can see how each site and each team member are performing. We also provide APIs to their Labour data (S4 Labour) and to Met office data. The power that is being gained from the insights available from combined sales and labour data is changing the way they do business and data really does now drives all decisions.

TaholaCloud is changing the way Pieminister think about their data, enabling them to see and understand their data in a simplified way, meaning informed decisions can be made quickly and with ease.

“We now have numbers at a click of a button in terms of turnover, margin, labour, sales mix, average spend & many more measures. We have reduced hours spent on building spreadsheets by 50% and we are discovering trends that we never knew existed.

The whole TaholaCloud implementation process was very slick and Tahola have been flexible to our needs and more than accommodating to the specific requirements we had. It’s fair to say that they have gone the extra mile from the start of the project and have worked in partnership with us every step of the way, something that has been key to Pieminister.

TaholaCloud has many advantages in comparison to other systems I have used before, speed is one of them, data changing before your eyes as you change selections on sites / date periods / products. Another advantage of TaholaCloud is that although you are purchasing a cloud based solution, you still have the opportunity to build your own dashboards/reports. These have now become part of the furniture here in a very short space of time. The General Manager’s now have fantastic insight into their business, that simply didn’t exist before and they can really own their numbers on a daily basis, which helps fuel the entrepreneurial spirit we encourage here at Pieminister.

I don’t think we have got 50% of what’s possible from TaholaCloud yet though, there is still so much more we can do, this will change over time as user adoption increases and we take the time to really understand the power of TaholaCloud and how it can be utilised across the whole of the business, integrating with additional data sources to uncover valuable insights, that we can actually act upon”.

To find out more about TaholaCloud, please contact:

Leigh Baillie

Marketing & Communications Director

Tahola Ltd

+44 7894 517828

Leigh.Baillie@Tahola.com