Data, diner forecasting, staff rotas, profit per dish and a website for one of the largest seafood restaurants in Spain.
Swimming in the same direction.
A bálamo is a shoal of fish that moves as if it were one. It’s also one of the largest seafood restaurants in Spain: in Alcorcón, with a vertical garden climbing the dining-room wall and crowds of diners any day of the week.
From the outside, everything flows. Inside, bookings lived in one system, sales in another, stock in a third, staff time records in a fourth and accounts in a fifth. Five systems, and none of them talking. And a team that played translator every morning.
Yesterday’s numbers
The first step was for management to know, before their first coffee, how the previous day had gone. Sales and diners by area, against the same weekday last year. An arrow up or an arrow down, and on to the next thing.
Underneath, there’s a data layer that brings together what used to live apart. You can’t see it, which is exactly how it should be. Everything else rests on it.
Hover over a part, or tab to it, to see what it does.Tap a part to see what it does.
How many it takes
A Saturday in spring is nothing like a Tuesday in November. Nor is a public holiday. And the pandemic data is like nothing else at all.
We built a diner forecast that takes all of that into account and, from it, how many staff are needed for each service and each area. A forecast isn’t always right. But it gets it wrong less often than gut feeling at seven on a Friday.
Whoever knows the floor makes the rota
We started with the ambitious option: a tool that would draw up the rotas on its own. It worked. It produced flawless rotas for a restaurant that doesn’t exist.
The real one has holidays that don’t fit in any box, contracts of every shape and size, and shift swaps for reasons no algorithm understands. So we changed our minds: whoever knows the floor makes the rota, and we prepare the ground for them.
A dashboard that fills itself in with what used to be looked up by hand, and a template that uploads the rota straight into the HR system. No copying, no pasting and no lost afternoons.
Hover over a step, or tab to it, to see what it does.Tap a step to see what it does.
What each dish brings in
We cross-referenced sales, costs and recipe costings to see what really keeps the business going and what does less than it seems. Some of the surprises had been on the menu for years.
The anchors stay where they are. Everything else, with data.
The pricing proposal began with the hard question: what not to touch. The usual water, the children’s menus, the old-favourite desserts. The anchors stay where they are. Everything else, with data.
What you don’t see
Audit-ready time-keeping reports, with scheduled hours against hours worked. Analytics where there used to be nothing, and a website overhauled from top to bottom so that anyone looking for seafood south of Madrid can find it.
Copilots, not replacements. At Bálamo, we learnt that from a rota.
Technology doesn’t know the waiters, and it doesn’t serve tables. It serves the people who do, so they start each service with the heavy lifting already done. Like a good shoal of fish: nobody collides, and everyone heads the same way.
