Nando’s: Retail KPI Reporting with Microsoft Power BI

Nando’s is a global fast-casual/quick-serve restaurant chain. Renowned for their famous grilled PERi PERi chicken, the chain has experienced incredible growth since their inception in South Africa in 1987 and now has 1,000+ locations in over 30 countries across the globe, including a recent expansion into Canada.

To aide their Canadian expansion and to better understand the performance of their various Canadian outlets, Nando’s partnered with MRS to discover how Power BI could help with storefront analytics reporting.

Delving into key performance metrics across Canadian retail outlets

As part of their Canadian expansion, the corporate management team was looking to delve deeper into various business metrics in order to better track operational performance across retail locations. With this information at hand, the company could better understand the Canadian market, specifically their store performance in Canada, and ultimately help new franchisees succeed.

The company needed advanced analytics reporting on critical metrics such as:

• Food wastage
• Costs of goods sold/input costs
• Menu item profitability and popularity
• Seating turnover
• Sales revenue by location, day of week, time of day, etc.
• Store traffic
• Basket analysis
• Labor hours, overtime and staff turnover

With this information readily at-hand, the company would be empowered to make better, more informed decisions at every level and could methodically improve their operations based on quantitative metrics. However, with an immense and ever-increasing pool of data scattered across multiple sources, amalgamating this information and providing it in an easily digestible format was an especially complex endeavor.

The Nando’s Canada team turned to the experience and expertise of the MRS Business Intelligence (BI) practice to learn how Power BI could fit their use case.

Retail storefront analytics using Microsoft Power BI

The POC solution integrated their new cloud-based SaaS platform with their point-of-sale (POS) machines, enabling the extraction of data from the storefront to the cloud. As the most feature-rich and user-friendly cloud-based analytics service, perfectly equipped to meet the needs of Nando’s’ business case, Microsoft Power BI was the reporting platform of choice. Leveraging Microsoft Power BI and the deep pool of data extracted from the POS machines and various other sources, the MRS BI team built highly intuitive graphical data visualizations on Nando’s’ KPIs and constructed reports that are mobile-responsive and cloud-driven to enable any time, any device access.

With MRS and Microsoft Power BI, the Nando’s Canada team and their franchisees were able to gain a deeper understanding of their operations and far more accurately measure KPIs – helping fuel success for Nando’s’ expansion and growth in Canada.