iWay Software Delivers Information to Donatos Pizza

With more information from DataMigrator in its data warehouse, Donatos plans to roll out additional reports for managers in the future.

Popular Restaurant Chain Builds New Data Warehouse With iWay DataMigrator

In 1963, Jim Grote founded Donatos Pizza with two simple goals: to make exceptional pizza and offer superior customer service. Today, the company has nearly 200 restaurants in five states, and its 2,000 employees abide by Donatos' four cultural cornerstones: live, love, laugh, and learn. When managers decided that it was time to completely overhaul their operational reporting systems, they turned to a name they had learned to love – Information Builders.

Donatos has relied on Information Builders WebFOCUS software as its business intelligence (BI) standard since 2005. The restaurant chain uses the software to develop reports on everything from daily sales to gross profit, and from financials to human resources. According to Diane Trcka, database administrator at Donatos Pizza, users throughout the organization are satisfied with this comprehensive BI environment and its ever-expanding menu of reports.

Building on these positive experiences with WebFOCUS, the IT department selected iWay DataMigrator, a robust extract, transform, and load (ETL) environment. iWay Software had a proven recipe for simplifying data integration tasks, including the creation, maintenance, and expansion of data warehouses, data marts, and operational data stores.

Freshening Up the IT Environment

Trcka works with a team of IT professionals. One of their tasks is to create new data marts for operational reporting purposes. When Trcka joined the Donatos family in 2005, the company had several solutions for gathering and analyzing point-of-sale (POS) data. "Our charter was to overhaul these POS systems and implement an enterprise reporting environment," she says.

The first step was to design a new data warehouse that includes all the POS data. Once the data warehouse architecture was established, Trcka faced a tedious data migration process. Donatos needed to move decades of POS data from SQL Server 7 to SQL Server 2005 – initially as a bulk transfer, and afterwards on a regular basis.

Once she was immersed in the DataMigrator environment, she discovered that the data integration required for this project was far easier to complete using these iWay tools than it was with the Microsoft ETL tools she had used in the past. Trcka was proficient with the program within one week, despite having no prior experience or training. As she learned more about DataMigrator, she discovered several capabilities that surpassed the functions of other programs she had worked with in the past. For instance, DataMigrator's primary key logic can determine whether a row of data incorporated into the warehouse needs to be inserted as a new data set or simply replace an existing set of data as an update. This capability yields the same result as an SQL Server process, but without any coding.

"This function really saves time because sometimes we load data several times per day, and with DataMigrator we don't have to delete a row and then reinsert it. It knows when to update the rows and when to leave them alone," says Trcka.

Watching the Benefits Rise

As a result, rather than spending months writing code and painstakingly transferring data, all Trcka had to do was link up data points with data targets in DataMigrator. After that, DataMigrator did the rest, transferring almost a decade worth of POS data. "After about a week's effort, the data was transferred without a hitch and with no manual tweaking necessary," she says.

Today, Donatos depends on DataMigrator to move data from the new POS data store to the new SQL Server 2005 warehouse. Stored procedures run right in the flow of data Trcka has created. A graphical workbench makes it easy to develop elaborate process flows related to complex jobs, such as building a large data warehouse with intricate load requirements. This frees up time that would formerly have been spent writing code.

Until the old POS systems are phased out, Donatos will continue to use DataMigrator on an ongoing basis to move data from its legacy POS systems to the new data warehouse. Once the new POS system is fully operational, this will no longer be necessary.

A Well Seasoned BI Strategy

According to Mike Born, a chief architect in Donatos' IT group, Donatos primarily uses the new data warehouse to give restaurant managers greater visibility into their store operations. "Every kind of report it takes to run a business is currently being developed using WebFOCUS," he says. The user environment consists of a menu system of parameter-driven reports.

Currently, all Donatos employees at the district level use WebFOCUS to access the data in the warehouse. Furthermore, restaurant employees in locations that have implemented the new POS system also have access to the data. In total, around 250 to 300 employees use the reporting system. Once the new programs are fully deployed the user base will grow to around 500 employees.

While Donatos completes its POS implementation and makes the data warehouse available to all of its restaurants, Born and his colleagues are discovering many other uses for WebFOCUS. They plan to use the BI software to augment many data analysis activities, such as to replace the OLAP cubes Donatos created using Microsoft Reporting Services. "Now that DataMigrator is aggregating our data in the warehouse, the cubes are used less often – mainly just for specialty reports," he explains.

As Donatos grows increasingly sophisticated in its reporting, data migration, and data warehouse initiatives, Trcka and her team will continue to look to Information Builders and iWay Software to enhance their IT strategy. They plan to report against PeopleSoft data and explore WebFOCUS Active Reports for delivering portable analytics to users in the field. They also want to add graphics and drill-down capabilities to dashboards. "WebFOCUS has proven its ability to deliver real-time information about inventory, sales, and promotions, in addition to standard financial reports," Born emphasizes. "Now that we have more information from DataMigrator in our data warehouse, we plan to roll out additional reports for managers in the future."

Donatos' original pizza shop in Columbus, Ohio remains one of the company's busiest and most successful restaurants. Grote believes his success is a function of offering a superior product, hiring great people, and adhering to strong management principles. Thanks to the pervasive information systems enabled by Information Builders and iWay Software, he is able to deliver the information his managers need to fulfill the company's vision.