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The QSR, fast casual, and casual dining businesses are full of ideas to improve profits. Not surprisingly, many require spending money to make money. From opening new restaurants to remodeling existing ones, from introducing new menu items to taking price, from buying TV advertising to running in-market promotions, any new program that works across a large network of restaurants can generate a lot of cash. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true - a new program that does not live up to expectations can have a devastating impact on profits if it is rolled out across the network and fails.
Why take risks based on guesswork? Instead, you can determine the true impact of any proposed restaurant initiative by intelligently testing it in some locations before implementing throughout the entire restaurant network.
That is exactly what APT's Test & Learn approach does. It identifies management actions that are most successful in improving performance, evaluates their impact, and helps executives make better, more accurate decisions about whether and how to move forward with new concepts.
A Best Practice Test & Learn capability answers three key questions before committing to rollout:
- What impact will the program have on my key performance measures (guest count, sales, profits, market share, ROI)?
- Will the program have a bigger impact on some restaurants than others? Which restaurants or regions offer the best predicted performance?
- Can elements of the program be modified for maximum positive impact?
THE APT ADVANTAGE
Predict the outcome of high-stakes programs.
The APT Suite doesn't just report on past actions — it predicts the impact of future actions in order to optimize decisions. Many systems allow analysts to review past sales trends and detect patterns. However, through a scientific Test & Learn approach, APT enables users to identify statistically significant results and build models directly from these results to predict the impact of future decisions. This enables organizations to make direct links from analysis to specific actions.
By contrast, commonly available reporting tools, despite working with similar data, do not have predictive and analytic capabilities. In other words, they leave you guessing.
The APT Suite allows you to accurately predict the profit impact of a variety of key business decisions. For example, APT empowers you to:
- Determine the impact of any marketing or merchandising initiative, such as new menu item introductions, promotions, online advertising, direct mail, pricing, etc.
- Determine the market capacity for any concept - by region and by market.
- Quantify the cannibalization impact of network changes.
- Determine the impact of any operational change, such as a new restaurant layout, change in staffing levels, change in hours, training, etc.
- Identify how locations are performing vs. potential overall and by category; specify which operational shortfalls are creating performance gaps.
- Predict which programs will be most successful in which locations; identify where to profitably roll out upgrade programs to additional restaurants.
- Create a "Winner's Profile" for locations in your network.
Perform analysis at warp-speed.
The APT Suite's built-in pattern recognition and optimization technology automatically seeks out segmentation and targeting opportunities to maximize the ROI of any action. It is built on the reality that most new business ideas are neither all success nor all failure — they tend to work well in certain situations but may not in others. In each analysis, the APT software automatically examines every element of data available about each location and looks for correlations between a location's performance and its other characteristics. Items with the highest correlation are presented to the analyst for review.
Tailor solutions for your business.
One size does not fit all. APT's modular approach allows you to tailor the software to the unique challenges your company faces.
Five core products work together to support the Test & Learn™ platform for Quick-Service and Casual Dining Restaurants:
Test & Learn for Sites provides the most advanced workflow-driven application of test management for large-scale consumer-focused organizations:
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- An intuitive interface guides the user through each step of the Test & Learn process, from hypothesis creation and test design to test evaluation and rollout.
- The tool also provides guidance on the broader challenges of managing a Test & Learn organization, from establishing default criteria for evaluating initiative success to monitoring the overall organizational testing calendar.
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Menu Analyzer is a fast, flexible tool for driving strategic decisions using check-level transaction data:
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- Menu Analyzer quantifies the true value of each menu item, based not only on each item's individual profitability, but also customer loyalty to each item and attachments of other items (such as beverages, sides, and desserts). These insights enable restaurant executives to decide which menu items should be promoted, deleted or improved.
- In addition, Menu Analyzer allows managers to quantify the potential costs of competing offers and discounts, enabling managers to make better decisions about which promotions to run in any given market.
- Coupled with APT's Test & Learn Management Suite, Menu Analyzer allows decision makers to understand the impact of any in-market change (marketing, pricing, etc.) on check size, check composition, attachments between items and customer loyalty.
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Network Planner is a complete tool for network planning and capital investment for brick-and-mortar sales:
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- From new site planning through existing site modification, Network Planner helps real estate professionals and planners assess investment opportunities and manage network growth.
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Test & Learn for Customers is the most advanced application for measuring the impact of a mix of actions across channels and over time:
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- Integrated customer, site, and geographic data allow restaurant executives to assess response to a program by customer segment so they can create targeted marketing offers.
- A cross-channel view of customer response and spending makes it easy to assess how an action in one channel is affecting customer spending in another channel.
- Allows you to maximize response by targeting customer communication to channel preference, items purchased, restaurant location, customer demographics, and more.
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Performance Manager provides performance-driven cultures with a front-to-back process for setting and managing performance targets:
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- Starting with benchmarking and modeling the underlying drivers of performance, this product allows field and operations managers to identify cohorts of similar sites or performers and establish experience-based targets for category-by-category and metric-by-metric expectations of performance.
- Customized report design and real-time performance reporting allow for precise measurement against your targets.
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