Qdoba Mexican Grill Uses Video-Driven BI To Aid Growth

October 2012 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

By Bob Johns, associate editor

The restaurant chain uses managed video as a service to help every department in the company achieve their goals.

Qdoba Mexican Grill had a legacy CCTV/DVR loss prevention solution that just no longer could accommodate the company’s needs as it rapidly expanded to more than 600 locations.

According to Scott Henry, formerly an IT analyst and now restaurant security specialist at Qdoba, “The legacy system only allowed viewing from company computers, not the access we needed, and it required a huge amount of maintenance by the IT department.” Plus, Henry knew that the newer LP solutions offered a lot of benefits to help Qdoba’s operations department take loss prevention initiatives from a reactionary to a proactive mode. At the time, Qdoba did not have anyone analyzing metrics to find anomalies; they merely responded when a robbery or large cash shortage occurred.

Remote accessibility is one of the main features of any new system that Henry would consider. “The team needs to be able to see what is going on, no matter where they are,” he notes. He began seeking out a cloudbased managed solution that would offer the flexibility to look in on restaurants and conduct investigations remotely. Initially the solutions providers were narrowed down to four, and each began a pilot program in several restaurants. In the end, Qdoba chose Envysion’s MVaaS (Managed video as a Service) solution to combine video, POS integration, and BI (business intelligence).