Largest Hardee's franchisee Boddie-Noell devours more data with SAS®

SAS helps the fast food operator boost marketing campaigns and democratize data

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May 22, 2018, 09:00 ET

CARY, N.C., May 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- With an ever-evolving menu and hits such as the Thickburger^® and Made From Scratch™ biscuits, Hardee's continues to tantalize customers and satisfy America's appetite for quality food served fresh. Boddie-Noell Enterprises Inc., is an integral part of this success. Opening its first Hardee's in 1962, Boddie-Noell is now the largest Hardee's franchise operator in the United States with more than 340 restaurants in four states.

To keep up with the growing number of stores and, in turn, the growing amount of data, Boddie-Noell chose SAS, the leader in analytics, for its analytics platform. Through an internal-hosted virtualized server, Boddie-Noell was able to spin up the latest capabilities of the SAS Platform, SAS^® Viya^®, within a week. Users were able to start using SAS Viya immediately, with little to no training.

"As a midsized business, I was under the impression SAS was mostly geared to enterprise-level companies," said Bob Larimer, Vice President of IT at Boddie-Noell. "What I discovered is just the opposite. SAS has been extremely economical and agile, yet the tools have power and insights that are really helping us learn more about our business."

The first department at Boddie-Noell to use the SAS Platform was marketing. Employees are now able to pull in all transactional data from all stores – not just summary data. This transactional data includes every aspect of the order – from the time it was placed to the itemized breakdown of what was ordered to the employee who rung it in to the payment method. The marketing department can now, for example, determine what items Hardee's should sell, at what time of the day and at what location. They've done this before, but not with such detail. The increased amount of data that can be analyzed opens a new world of customer insights.

As Boddie-Noell expands its SAS footprint with SAS Viya, the loss prevention department can take advantage of powerful analytics as well. The department can perform its own analysis from multiple sources of data in addition to transactions data to improve the detection of profit-eroding activities, then work to correct those issues immediately.

The openness of SAS Viya allows Boddie-Noell to reduce the complexity involved in supporting the data needs of various departments. It will support the development of a self-service model for more departments over time, which will streamline efforts and encourage collaboration.

"With SAS we are, in essence, decentralizing IT and democratizing data, and that is a good thing," said Larimer. "We are giving our end users access to an entire data set to use so they can dig in and find exactly what they're looking for without something getting lost in translation with the IT request. Efficiencies are extremely important to us. We are in a 'penny business' with a low price point but also a fast turn and large quantity of product. We've found that if we can even save 0.025 percent in any area, it can equate to $1 million in a year's time. SAS is helping us find every penny we can without sacrificing quality and service."

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