Tom is a restauranteur at heart who co-founded Opsanalitica, an operations data platform that helps restaurants manage and measure human activity and avoid missing the “little things” that can impact profitability. Armed with that data, restaurant owners and managers can identify and remediate issues, in real-time, before they affect the business negatively. The data and KPI’s that are important to track differs for each restaurant. Data available to restaurant owners has included sales data, labor data, food costs, inventory, and customer satisfaction data. Operations data has only become accessible recently with the use of the tablet. Operations data is a critical part of the restaurant decision-making process and makes it easier to make decisions that truly impact sales and profits. Restaurant leaders need to do more testing on new products or recipe changes and then gather data to determine if that change is one that should be applied to all locations or applied long term. Emulating menu items from competitor restaurants is dangerous without proper testing and research to ensure that the menu item is a good fit for your restaurant. Quotes “You can get data drunk pretty quickly and you can start drawing parallels that can lead you down a path that – I don’t want to say dangerous – but you start to solve a problem that maybe doesn’t exist.” - Joseph “Operations data is the missing key that we didn’t have before. [...] It’s the contextual data that a lot (restaurant) leaders need to make better decisions.” - Tommy “Sales, food costs and labor costs are lagging indicators of how well you’re operating. Sales don’t predict operations, operations predict sales.” - Tommy “We need to make sure that hospitality excellence is not hindered by the knowledge afforded by good data.” - Joseph “Opsanalitica has a feature called Data Accuracy Scoring, and we can tell you whether the data is good or bad and you can filter out all the bad data.” - Tommy Transcript 00:00.00vigorbrandingHey everyone and today I'm joined by my friend tommy andulis he is co-founder of Ops Analytica a system we're going to get into in a little bit. Ah but Tommy why don't you say hello and give a little bit of backstory. 00:10.50TommySure hi thank you so much for having me Joseph so I'm Tommy you knowless I am one of the co-founders of bobs and lico like ah just said but really I'm a restaurant tour by heart like my grandparents. Both. Immigrants to this country I'm Greek and Puerto rican so I used to have a joke that I was born in a dish pit you know, but the reality is what's ironic is that um. You know I started in restaurants at 14 in Columbia Maryland my mom would drop me off at the jerry subs and pizza I had a work permit and I learned how to cook steak and cheeses and I kind of never really looked back from that. But um, what's interesting is that both my grandparents had restaurants but my parents were tech people. So I was kind of bred to get into restaurant technology because I had the restaurant background and the love of restaurants. But then my parents. My dad was a rocket scientist and my mom worked at Lockheed and so I had the tech background yeah in the middle there and so I ended up doing restaurants at the beginning. 01:07.90vigorbrandingFlex with me. 01:13.13TommyAnd then I morphed into tech so that's kind of my story since 14 I've been doing either restaurants or tech I suppose. 01:18.48vigorbrandingI love that so you're you're Greek and Puerto rican and I am sicilian in Puerto rican or as I say sicilar rican it's a lot of easier. Yeah I love it. 01:25.33TommyNice I'm a greeko rican so there you go wait. So your so that's what's amazing about America is that in no other time in the world with sicilian and a Puerto rican get together and have kids but yet. And this one phone call. You have 2 guys that are white that are Puerto