Loading
Loading
Before: The platform team had a strategy deck. The stores had grease on the keyboards and a different definition of "close" for the night. Two of the new sites never posted inventory the same way as the legacy brand. Board asked for roll-up metrics. Ops could not produce them without a side spreadsheet nobody wanted to own. What was broken: Everyone called it integration. In practice it was three payroll systems, two inventory tools, and a shared drive full of PDFs labeled "final_v3_really." GMs were good at running dinner. They were not hired to be data engineers. When corporate pushed templates, sites complied on paper and routed around them on Saturday night.
We picked a boring spine: how time is coded, how inventory is counted, how transfers are named, and when numbers lock for the week. Brands could keep menu voice; they could not keep secret shortcuts on the counts. We built a 30-day onboarding path for each new site: week one walk the line, week two shadow close, week three run close with backup, week four fly solo with audit. The next acquisition inherited a checklist instead of a hero project.
Corporate stopped apologizing for late board packs. Sites still argued about menu ideas, which is healthy. They stopped arguing about whether last Tuesday's food cost included catering. The work was not software magic. It was the same close, every site, on the same calendar.