Domino's Pizza delivers effective data

Domino's Pizza, the world's leading pizza delivery company and largest privately held restaurant chain, uses decision support software to help executive, regional and field marketing managers navigate daily point-of-sale data and guide them to information they need to successfully manage the business.

With close to 4 500 Domino's Pizza stores in the United States and over 1 700 in 62 other countries, including South Africa, supporting end user information needs has been challenging.

"The company required a Web-architected application to serve multiple users, and keep even remote users in touch with the information they needed," says Gavin Steinberg, business manager at Dimension Data Group company SPL.

Domino's Pizza, with retail sales exceeding $3 billion in 1998, has used decision support for over five years, but turned to Comshare DecisionWeb for its easy-to-use interface and functionality.

George Azrak, vice president information systems development for Domino's Pizza, says: "The rich functionality of Comshare's Web interface will allow us to provide consistent delivery whether the user is at our headquarters, in one of our regional offices, in our international offices, or on the road.

"Comshare gives us a lot of flexibility to tailor the system for an executive, middle manager, heavy-duty analyst, and even a user who is just looking for some packaged information - we can serve all of our users," says Azrak.

"Also, Comshare's data visualisation techniques for detecting hidden problems in operational data are a big hit with our users. We definitely like what Comshare has done using these techniques to help guide users to information they need to act upon," he says.

"Comshare is another weapon in our arsenal that's going to open our data to a new class of users that we have not reached before," says Azrak.

Domino's legacy decision support software was used by the company's 'power users' but was a bit overwhelming to other users. Consequently, Domino's looked for vendors that had an easy-to-use interface, and a back-end that was compatible with the company's relational data warehouse.

"Domino's marketing team felt most comfortable with Comshare's solution," says Azrak, "and Comshare's open architecture allowed us to use Comshare DecisionWeb with Microsoft's SQL Server 7.0 OLAP Services sitting on top of our Informix data warehouse. We have about 150 gigabytes of data. We felt that the whole information supply chain would work well - from point-of-sale to delivery of the information to the desktops of our marketing managers and executives."

Comshare's considerable experience as the innovator in management planning and control applications for more than 30 years entered into the decision. "Comshare, unlike the other vendors, approached the problem from a functional standpoint rather than a technical one. They looked at what our users needed before offering a technology solution, which could fix the functional problems," says Azrak.

Gavin Steinberg, elaborating on the benefits of Comshare's DecisionWeb, says: "Users work directly with business information for ad hoc reporting and develop applications using advanced data visualisation and data mining techniques via Java-enabled Internet browsers.

"This Web solution offers a low-maintenance alternative to traditional client/server-only applications including the ability to write back to the central database, charting, and intuitive drill-down."