Client background

Culver Franchising System, LLC (Culver's) is a popular fast-casual restaurant chain that serves fresh, made-to-order butter burgers, frozen custard and signature sides like Wisconsin cheese curds. Known for its friendly and welcoming service, it places a high value on hospitality and ensuring a pleasant dining experience. It has expanded primarily through a franchise model, allowing local entrepreneurs to own and operate individual restaurants. While concentrated in the Midwest, it has expanded to over 950 locations across 26 states.

The business challenge

While rapidly expanding their footprint in the competitive restaurant franchise market, it became increasingly apparent to Culver's that they needed to improve their ability to measure and analyze restaurant performance in order to maintain consistent quality across all locations for its guests. To gain a comprehensive view of overall performance, Culver's needed to be able to analyze not only sales and customer experience growth, but additional areas such as staffing and training, guest satisfaction, restaurant evaluations, drive-thru speed of service, sales mix, pricing, food costs and more.

Gathering and combining the data needed to pull this broad analysis together immediately became a complex process to maintain manually, which added risks and concerns around data quality and accuracy, data accessibility and timeliness of analysis. These challenges would ultimately slow the company's growth plans if they could not confidently analyze and monitor the performance and health of each location to ensure it was staying true to its well-established brand.​

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly Digital worked with Culver's to define a strong data strategy through discovery and prioritization of data needs, design of a business dimension model and future state solution concept, as well as charting a course with an implementation road map.

Baker Tilly Digital then provided data solution services to perform the implementation of the road map and build new data capabilities, which allowed the company to:

• Store and analyze large volumes of data in a data warehouse powered by Snowflake, eliminating previous data silos and creating a single source of truth for analytics​
• Create interactive reports and dashboards using Power BI, to easily surface actionable insights on performance of its 950+ restaurant locations
• Develop a dashboard to score and analyze restaurant performance against multiple key performance indicators​
• Leverage this new scalable and flexible data environment to explore and tackle new analytics use cases with ease, further advancing the growth of a data-driven culture​
• Drive the organic growth of their analytics team to support the new environment and analytics needs of the organization​

With the success of the data strategy and solution implementation, Culver's aims to expand use of its data capabilities to its franchisees and further aid them in driving business growth in their restaurants and the resulting franchise system. Baker Tilly Digital will continue to be an advisor and provide solutions to Culver's to ensure it remains competitive in the restaurant franchise market. ​