The challenge

Our client’s success relied on being able to have a clear picture of how each of its restaurants and trucks were performing in the context of the company’s overall performance. Their data was sourced from numerous applications and platforms, was stored at varying levels of granularity, and did not allow for user-friendly reporting and insights.

They asked us to help build a Business Intelligence (BI) reporting system that would let them consolidate data and develop KPIs and business metrics to better visualize and understand many aspects of their business including: revenue, costs, financial performance, user journeys, customer service and satisfaction, and marketing metrics.

The solution

To meet this innovative food delivery company’s growing needs, we recommended a modern data platform built on Snowflake, Fivetran, and Looker. With Looker as their BI tool, their Finance, Customer, Marketing, and other teams would have the data modeling, reports, and visualizations they needed to empower them to make decisions based on accurate and relevant information. Looker’s advanced data models also provided the teams with enhanced data views in critical areas, including:

• Restaurant, fleet, and customer KPIs
• Marketing KPIs
• User journeys and purchase funnel analytics
• Investor reporting
• Enterprise-wide inventory
• Food and packaging standard costs at the recipe and raw ingredient level
• Labor costs for chefs, customer service, and culinary employees
• Material expiration costs
• Order issue analysis including credits and refunds
• Purchasing expenses and freight costs
• Menu and order level revenue and allocated costs

We recommended they also use Snowflake’s Data Cloud, and Fivetran to create an automated data pipeline that replicates business data into cloud warehouses. Snowflake offered a simple and flexible solution, providing a central repository where their teams could access the data they needed. Fivetran’s features also make data access fast and easy.

To ensure that this startup’s teams would get the most out of their new data platform, we implemented administrative best practices for each tool and provided training for business, advanced, and administrative users.

How did it turn out?

With an improved data platform in place, they can be confident that they have the accurate, accessible, actionable data they need to guide their growth strategy. They now have the ability to track food, beverage and packaging consumption down to the raw material level, as well as labor and other costs for each order item. They can also easily analyze variable costs — from freight to payment processing fees — and their impact on margins.