romano's macaroni Grill
Romano’s Macaroni Grill is a nationwide Italian restaurant brand founded in 1988. Named the No. 1 Italian Restaurant Chain in America by a Nation’s Restaurant News consumer survey, Macaroni Grill has company owned stores in 15 different states coast-to-coast including Hawaii.
Romano’s Macaroni Grill was in growth mode after the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.
Its team was expanding and its loyal customers are coming back to the restaurants, but with surging demand comes the potential for inefficiencies and lost productivity.
Before Expo, the operations team was juggling a myriad of Excel spreadsheets and dozens of emailed reports to stay on top of store sales and metrics. Restaurant general managers didn’t have an easy way to understand how they could use their data to drive sales performance every day, since legacy reporting only gave them limited insight on a weekly or monthly cadence.
“Everyone was operating on old information,” says the COO of Romano’s Macaroni Grill.“We were emailing files around but our GMs didn’t have real time information they could use to impact their teams’ performance.”
The lack of simple-to-understand, timely information was not limited to the operations team. Romano’s Macaroni Grill CFO says, “we have over a dozen different software systems but none of it was talking to one another. We had trouble getting the company aligned on KPIs because each system was telling a different story and there was no source of truth.”
Expo integrated the entire software stack allowing Romano’s Macaroni Grill to have a unified dashboard for the entire organization.
With Expo, the entire organization is aligned on one source of truth for all of the company’s most important metrics. All teams use Expo to run meetings so that everyone can be on the same page. One general manager who came from restaurants like Olive Garden and Cracker Barrel, says “At those companies, all I had was a weekly report. Expo is more advanced and has more depth.”
Romano’s Macaroni Grill has leveraged Expo to turn their data into actionable insights that drive sales. Restaurant managers use Expo to create performance based schedules, run contests, and train their employees 1:1 to upsell specific menu items.
Area Managers and Restaurant Managers log into Expo every day to find out what the areas of opportunity are for the business and use this data to coach, manage and train their teams. Armed with this data, Romano’s Macaroni Grill has increased their sales averages over $1 per person which has resulted in millions of dollars in incremental revenue for the company.
“It affects our bottom line. Managers are able to see everything in real time. So they are able to make quicker decisions as opposed to waiting for an Excel spreadsheet to come out,” said Romano’s Macaroni Grill CFO.
“It’s been a game-changer for us.”