Customer Case for
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and LS Central
ArmyNavy Burger + Burrito
Founded in 2009, ArmyNavy Burger + Burrito is a fast-casual restaurant chain serving fresh-made American-Mexican cuisine, with a special focus on premium quality burgers and burritos.
ArmyNavy’s company culture is focused on discipline, honesty, and integrity. The company takes food quality and customer service very seriously. Food is only prepared upon order to ensure freshness, and the restaurants’ open-style kitchens allow customers to watch as their orders are freshly made. All outlets feature a unique store architecture based on the Quonset Hut, a structure used in the military, which makes them stand out from other stores.
In just few years, ArmyNavy has grown to become the third biggest fast casual burger restaurant chain, and the number one Mexican restaurant chain, in the Philippines.
Better Control and Greater Savings
With LS Central, ArmyNavy has reduced errors, eliminated time consuming manual tasks and got its business under control.
Real-time data
Store data consolidation used to take ArmyNavy 2-3 days to prepare. Today, the data replication in LS Central allows management to get data from the stores in real time. This means the company can now generate store reports as needed.
Lower Costs
ArmyNavy also decreased the cost of manpower, as the automations reduce the need for manual rekeying of data. To get even more savings, the company deployed their LS Central license in the cloud. This frees them from the high maintenance cost of servers, reduces the need for internal IT manpower, and guarantees 24/7 security from a data center.
Easy Reporting
Reporting is finally easy and painless. With the old system it took at least 3 hours to generate stock monitoring reports, because the team needed to manually compare the data to their logbooks. Now, thanks to the integrated warehouse and inventory, stock reports are created in the system in just a few clicks.
Sales and stock control
Now that all stores and departments are connected through the system, monitoring of sales and stock is much easier. The IT team does not have to physically go to each store to manually update the POS, and prices and product updates can be rolled out quickly, straight from headquarters.
Accounting can generate financial reports faster, enabling management to make timely, informed decisions.
Disparate system causing mistakes
When ArmyNavy opened, they were using a local brand of POS. Each POS had its own database, so when it was time to update prices or products, the IT staff was forced to physically go to each single store to perform the updates. The database located at POS level also posed security issues. The software was only compatible with Windows XP, which quickly became a limit to the company’s potential.
At headquarters, ArmyNavy used MYOB for accounting. The system was however limited to accounting only, so they installed Filemaker to handle purchasing.
With all these disparate systems in place, the staff needed to manually re-encode and verify data coming from different sources. This was very expensive for the company and made the data prone to errors.
As the business grew and new stores were opened, the company realized that the system they were using had become inadequate for their needs. They required a much more powerful and reliable system.
An integrated solution
The management started looking for a centralized system that could connect all their stores and departments. The two solutions that made it to the final stage of the selection process were SAP B1 and LS Central. After considering all aspects of both, management at ArmyNavy Burger + Burrito chose LS Central. The deciding factor was the fact that with LS Central, front-end and back-end tasks can be managed through a single platform.
All the needed functions in the standard version
ArmyNavy found the initial phase of the project implementation difficult. The main problem was that they had not assigned a dedicated project manager to the task. To help drive the project ahead, management decided to hire Performance Advantage Systems International, Inc., a local LS Retail implementing partner, to be ArmyNavy’s internal project manager.
The company successfully adopted the standard version of LS Central. The system has such wide-ranging functionalities that there was no need for any customizations. Today, all of ArmyNavy’s outlets nationwide run on LS Central.
Just recently, ArmyNavy made another smart business decision to maximize the benefits from their existing system by upgrading from on-premises to cloud. By leveraging cloud technology, the company gets several advantages in terms of flexibility and savings. They began enjoying the benefits of their new solution immediately, including:
- Reduces the need for internal IT manpower
- Free from high maintenance cost of servers
- Guarantees 24/7 security from a data center
- Automatically updating to the latest version of the software
- Security and reliability
- Frequent upgrades
- Business continuity with no downtime
- Access the data needed on any device anytime and anywhere
“Managing 100+ stores is not an easy feat and having a unified system for a restaurant chain like ours is the most ideal set-up; we wouldn’t want it any other way. With this set-up, we eliminate a lot of inefficiencies, manual monitoring and mitigate the risks of unreliable data and information. Now that we are migrating all our stores to LS Central and starting to use tools like Power BI, we will eliminate further our manual processes and make the system work seamlessly, with minimal manual intervention.” – Chellet Paez-Laquian, Chief Operating Officer
Additionally, ArmyNavy successfully implemented Kitchen Display System (KDS) to speed up production time and enable kitchen staff to prioritize orders according to whether it is an dine-in or take-out order and how busy the kitchen is. All communication between kitchen and front (orders, items, preparation status) now goes through the POS. Orders are now better organized and more easily fulfilled.
ArmyNavy is always working to provide better customer service. Self-service kiosks will be deployed within the next couple of months.
“Technology will play a very big role in addressing industry changes and trends. One trend that we are looking at is digitalization, where customers do not need to interact as much with restaurant staff to order food. We want to seamlessly integrate different technology solutions to make our operations more efficient and be able to effectively ride the changing times.”
– Chellet Paez-Laquian, Chief Operating Officer