Dickey’s Barbecue Pit Gains Operational Insight across 500 Stores with Advanced Big Data Analytics in the Cloud

iOLAP delivers "Smoke Stack” Solution on Amazon Web Services by Combining Syncsort DMX for Data Integration, Redshift for Data Warehousing and Yellowfin for Business Intelligence

Woodcliff Lake, N.J., Los Gatos, CA. and Melbourne, Australia – June 1, 2015

Business intelligence (BI) and data warehouse solutions provider iOLAP Inc. has combined Syncsort’s DMX data integration software with Yellowfin’s BI platform and Amazon Redshift for data warehousing to provide one of America’s most successful food chains, Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, with deep operational insight across its 500 U.S. restaurants.

See Dickey’s take on the implementation HERE >

See the Wall Street Journal's write-up on the implementation HERE >

The advanced analytics solution, Smoke Stack, uses the latest Big Data technology and is hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-platform for flexibility and to minimize ongoing resource requirements. It was developed in response to the phenomenal growth of Dickey’s business and inability of its previous store-by-store reporting tool to combine data from all restaurants and source systems to provide critical company-wide insights.

“Dickey’s needed an easy and cost-effective way to integrate, analyze and act on valuable business data by creating advanced visualizations and performing data analytics with minimal on-site infrastructure and support personnel,” said Laura Rea Dickey, CIO for Dickey’s Barbecue Restaurants. “By leveraging the scalability and reliability of AWS, the power and speed of Syncsort’s DMX data integration platform, and the intuitive data discovery in Yellowfin, the platform gives us a rich, immersive system to access, query and analyze our rapidly growing and changing business data. We can now quickly and easily understand and act on vital sales, labor, inventory costs and customer satisfaction KPIs throughout our business.”

The hosted cloud application, delivered by iOLAP, includes:

• Cloud-based Data Integration: Restaurant data is published to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, Amazon S3, and then parallel loaded into Amazon Redshift leveraging the lightweight, easy-to-use interface of Syncsort’s data integration solution, DMX. The speed of DMX allows Dickey’s to rapidly collect, transform and load thousands of very large files, with diverse data types from multiple servers across all of Dickey’s locations, without performance bottlenecks.


• Cloud-ready Business Intelligence: Running on Linux server-based Amazon EC2 instances, Yellowfin’s 100% Web-based, cloud-ready and highly scalable BI platform makes it easy and efficient for Dickey’s to perform a new level of analytics. Non-technical business users can independently leverage the easy-to-use reporting and charting features to create stunning visualizations. Dickey’s also uses the advanced analytics functions to measure their performance against key sales, labor, inventory costs and customer satisfaction KPIs.


• A Cloud-based Enterprise Data Warehouse: Amazon Redshift was a natural choice for cloud-based Enterprise Data Warehousing, allowing developers to quickly react to performance constraints using the many tools available within the AWS platform. Performance expectations have been exceeded and Dickey’s can cost-effectively adjust their storage needs as their data volumes grow.


• Cloud Model Pricing: Smoke Stack takes advantage of low-cost AWS data storage and processing, as well as Syncsort and Yellowfin’s cloud pricing models, to deliver the entire solution cost-effectively. The solution provides enterprise-class features without the enterprise price tag.

“Smoke Stack has made data-driven business insights quick and easy to attain, allowing us to focus our efforts on using our data instead of manually analyzing it,” continued Laura Rea Dickey. “This significant improvement to our reporting and analytics environment translates into more dollars saved and earned. In addition, the ease-of-use has allowed us to seamlessly integrate the data technology into our everyday operations, introducing it to non-technical business users, all without painfully changing business processes. This flexibility has been key to user adoption and given us valuable insights. Smoke Stack has bridged the gap for us from data that is merely accessible, to data that is valuable, timely, manageable and actionable."

 

About Syncsort

Syncsort provides enterprise software that allows organizations to collect, integrate, sort and distribute more data in less time, with fewer resources and lower costs. Thousands of customers in more than 85 countries, including 87 of the Fortune 100 companies, use our fast and secure software to optimize and offload data processing workloads. Powering over 50% of the world’s mainframes, Syncsort software provides specialized solutions spanning “Big Iron to Big Data,” including next gen analytical platforms such as Hadoop, cloud, and Splunk. For more than 40 years customers have turned to Syncsort’s software and expertise to dramatically improve performance of their data processing environments, while reducing hardware and labor costs. Experience Syncsort at www.syncsort.com.

About iOLAP

iOLAP, Inc. is a strategic data consultancy specializing in Big Data, Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) and Business Intelligence (BI) strategy and solutions. They are completely focused on these markets and bring a client-centric and business-focused perspective to all of their engagements. iOLAP has been in business since 1999 with in-depth expertise across all EDW and BI technology areas, including the newest leading-edge Business Analytics, Data Visualization and Big Data architectures. They serve some of the world’s largest companies across all major industries. While other consultants are still trying to figure it out, iOLAP has already delivered results, thanks to better people, strategy, delivery practices and methodology. Visit them online at www.iolap.com.

About Yellowfin

Yellowfin is a global Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics software vendor passionate about making BI easy. Founded in 2003 in response to the complexity and costs associated with implementing and using traditional BI tools, Yellowfin is a highly intuitive 100 percent Web-based reporting and analytics solution. Yellowfin is a leader in mobile, collaborative and embeddable BI as well as Location Intelligence and data visualization.

Over 10,000 organizations, and more than one million end-users across 70 different countries, use Yellowfin every day. For more information, visit www.yellowfinbi.com

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