According to finance director Sophie Gilchreath, Pizza Pilgrim's in-house business intelligence system enables its teams to focus on insights rather than extracting and crunching data, resulting in more efficient operations and driving the business vision across departments.
Speaking at MCA’s Hostech conference earlier this month, Gilchrist explained how the pizzeria group implemented bespoke technology built in-house to improve financial efficiency and operational insight.
The “Joshua” intelligence system was born out of a desire to realize Pizza Pilgrims' vision and move away from outdated systems, she told delegates.
“It was a question of how do we deliver our vision, driven by technology,” Gilchreath said. “We were measuring our vision against traditional KPIs, but we found our existing systems were cumbersome and complicated.
“We believed there was a better way to measure the performance of our teams and our pizzerias.”
Joshua captures data from all sources across the business and makes it available across teams, ensuring all Pizza Pilgrims sites are competing on a level playing field.
“Everyone has access to the same data, but that data is tailored to who is looking at it,” Gilchreath explains. “Not only does this reinforce our vision, it also means that some teams who are less data savvy can spend their time digging into valuable business insights rather than pulling data.”
“Joshua uses AI to look for outliers within the week and help GMs explain why average spend was lower on Wednesday, for example.”
The system is also linked to PizzaBot, allowing team members to ask questions about the business and receive instant answers.
“We have a lot of Gen Z talent in our business, so PizzaBot was about bringing things up to date and getting rid of outdated policy documents and binders.
“It still exists, but the information is now more accessible.”
This means staff spend less time searching for information and more time delivering a better experience for guests, which also builds trust, Gilchreath added.
“We're leveraging AI to create information at our fingertips and make our teams happier.”
Though the system is still in the testing phase, the team’s early engagement and reaction to PizzaBot has been positive.
“At the core of our vision is making people happy, one pizza at a time,” Gilchreath says. “We're trying to figure out how to bring this vision to life in every aspect of our business, and we're driving that by aligning our KPIs.”
