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Communication Systems Enhance Service At Pizza Hutby Linda NicastroHow many large specialty pizzas were sold in the Northeast last weekend? How many customers had multiple pizzas delivered during the big game on Sunday night? Is there enough labor in the restaurant to provide the proper service for hundreds of customers on any given day? Pizza Hut, the restaurant giant based in Wichita, Kan., uses networking and a sophisticated restaurant management system to help corporate and restaurant employees at 4,800 stores nationwide answer questions like these. Daily, the company relies on dial-up communications to poll restaurants or "field units" for data such as sales, guest checks and customer data. The polled data is posted to an IBM 3090 mainframe and upon dial-up, delivered as reports to 350 traveling area managers responsible for the performance of multiple restaurants. At the heart of the polling system are four Xylogics Annex communication servers speeding communications between two IBM RS/6000 hosts and a bank of modems. The RS/6000s, channel-attached to the mainframe and using TCP/IP, run Legent Corp.'s MLINK/ACM data transport product, making it possible to poll gigabytes of data daily. Pizza Hut attributes a polling success rate of 98 percent to a near fault-tolerant system and the automatic processes inherent in it. In the Field The communications network enables better management within Pizza Hut restaurants. The typical field unit uses a 386 or 486 PC running Unix as a back-of-house processor. The Unix box is linked to point-of-sale terminals that enable employees to take ord ers and handle cashier functions. Restaurant managers use the Unix systems to tap Pizza Hut's Field Management System, an application portfolio developed in-house that provides tools for service planning and forecasting, operations control, business analysis, computer training and systems administration. The communications network makes it possible to deliver software upgrades to field units electronically. "The network is growing and it's our responsibility to make sure the capacity and reliability are adequate to support the business," says Tim Zimmerman, manager of communication systems. Communications with field restaurants are one aspect of networking at Pizza Hut, but they're essential to helping the company monitor business performance and deliver the best service possible.
Tim Zimmerman
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