How Hardee’s Largest Franchisee Uses AI to Serve Up Efficiency and Profits

The largest Hardee’s franchisee in the United States is harnessing artificial intelligence and data-driven insights to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction, which are key drivers of success in the fast-paced world of quick-service restaurants.

Boddie-Noell Enterprises said customers want their orders taken correctly, food served hot and fresh, and then to go quickly on their way, according to an SAS case study. Failing on one of these three factors means potentially losing repeat business.

The company has embarked on a digital transformation that involves 326 Hardee’s locations across the Carolinas, Virginia and Kentucky, and more than 8,000 employees, in partnership with SAS.

Boddie-Noell aimed to improve every aspect of its operations — from staffing and menu planning to payment processing and promotional strategies, the study said.

This is a marked departure from how the franchisee used to do things. Not long ago, Boddie-Noell’s business decisions were driven by spreadsheets and older data. Executives would often look at performance data from the previous week or even the past month, per the study.

“We were always looking behind,” Bob Larimer, senior vice president of information services at Boddie-Noell, said in the study.

Now, the company is using real-time analytics that provide a detailed, moment-to-moment view of operations across the franchise. It tracks food costs, demand for menu items, payroll and revenue, according to the study.

The company processes nearly 40 million data records daily, ranging from transaction times and order preferences to employee shifts and payment methods, the study said. The dataset powers a suite of dashboards and reports that allow managers to make fast, accurate decisions tailored to each restaurant’s performance and customer behavior.

AI is changing how companies make financial decisions, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Smart Spending: How AI Is Transforming Financial Decision Making.” More than two-thirds of chief financial officers surveyed said they would invest in AI solutions that provide real-time visibility into expenditures.

AI also drives value and operational efficiency through predictive analytics, procurement cost control and risk management. Each of these functions plays a role in firms’ financial decision making, the report found.

“With AI, we can automate procurement processes, reducing human errors and improving cost control across the supply chain,” one CFO told PYMNTS Intelligence.

Optimizing Staffing and Food Delivery

One of the most noticeable impacts of AI at Boddie-Noell has been in scheduling and payroll optimization. By analyzing traffic patterns and customer orders down to the second, the company discovered inefficiencies in late-night staffing, the study said.

“After digging into the data, we discovered we had too many people on the clock during the late-night hours, when traffic didn’t justify the amount of staff,” Boddie-Noell Director of Analytics David Gardner said in the study. “…Now we know when to get people on and off the clock.”

Menu planning has also changed. Using detailed analysis of daypart trends — breakfast, lunch, dinner and late-night — Boddie-Noell identified untapped opportunities, per the study.

For example, data revealed a strong demand for breakfast items between 11 a.m. and noon. That insight helped the company extend breakfast hours — normally from 5 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. — a move that was initially met with skepticism from staff but led to double-digit sales increases, the study said.

The transformation extends to customer-facing technology as well. Most customers paid with credit cards, but these payment terminals were expensive to maintain, and they often failed, according to the study.

By digging into the data of how people paid, the company determined that it was faster and less taxing on the terminal to do tap to pay. So, the chain encouraged employees to tap the credit card instead of swiping or inserting the card, per the study.

Delivery services have also become crucial for sales. However, customers who ordered for delivery liked different items than people who ordered in person, the latter tending to buy food suitable for travel. So, the company dug into the data to figure out which menu items to promote in-store and through digital channels to maximize sales, the study said.

Boddie-Noell also expanded access to the data outside its technical staff. By letting business workers tap into analytical dashboards, self-service reports and data visualization capabilities, the company enables restaurant managers and field leaders to make data-informed decisions themselves rather than constantly asking IT to do the analyses, according to the study.

“Our 38 district managers can quickly and easily evaluate how their restaurants are performing and determine if they need to make changes to be more successful,” Gardner said, per the study.

In one initiative, the company evaluated new menu items by setting up a test market of 58 restaurants. They also set up a control group and matched restaurants with similar sales and other criteria. By doing so, they could see which menu item would succeed or not, the study said.

Gardner called the test a “big win for us,” per the study.

Forecasting is another area where AI is delivering tangible value. In its first quarter of using automated forecasting tools, Boddie-Noell’s projections were off by 0.1%, which Gardner said was “incredible,” according to the study.

“Growth like Boddie-Noell’s doesn’t happen by luck,” Larimer said in the study. “It’s the result of hard work and decisions backed by reliable data.”

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