Maddux NewsWire

Crabby Bill’s Seafood is a chain of six family run restaurants located on the coast of Florida in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area that promises to serve the freshest fish and local favorites. But while food has to be served quickly and piping hot, Luis Campuzano, Crabby Bill’s Chief Financial and Technical Officer, found that the data he needed to run the business was regularly served up cold.

The problem was simple; the data, which includes customer feedback, accounting information, sales data, and inventory information, was in two old databases and access to it was slow. “The main challenge was to be able to link to our data in the backend,” explains Luis. “All of our data was in two or three databases in the backend and when we had to transfer files over, it was just more trouble than it was worth.” That was until Luis learned that with FileMaker Pro 9 he could access, use and manipulate the vital data that was residing in those two databases with one application, potentially saving precious time and resources.

Working with Phillip Kurpe, the senior partner of PK Information Systems, LLC in Clearwater, Florida, Luis was able to connect to those backend databases. He was then able to create custom reports such as sales and scheduling, do calculations, and use current data from his existing FileMaker databases seamlessly through the FileMaker Pro 9 interface.

Organizing Over 4 Million Records

“We store all the restaurant sales from the chain in the databases, we also have an accounting package that tracks the inventory, and they are both in the backend,” says Luis. “So the data that I’m tapping into are in those two databases. Now I’m able to look at both databases in FileMaker Pro 9 and see our combined accounting, inventory and sales data easily and quickly.”

Now that over 4 million records in hundreds of tables in the backend databases are easily accessible, Luis has implemented a Conditional Formatting feature, which allows him to quickly visually identify something that needs attention. As a restaurant chain, there are always things specific to his business that Luis needs to attend to. “We actually wrote a seating program for our stores in an earlier version of FileMaker Pro,” he says “and now with conditional formatting it’s a lot easier to use.”

OS Flexibility

The restaurants use a mix of different computers and operating systems; some Apple computers in the restaurants, and a collection of Windows-based machines in the main office. That made FileMaker Pro (which runs on Windows and Mac) an obvious choice – and for Luis, made for easy compatibility across the network.

The rapidity with which Luis’ old data is now served up to him, the ease with which he can see that data and extrapolate the information he needs from it, and the knowledge that it can all be used and manipulated in an interface with which he is familiar is a recipe for success – the secret sauce behind a successful franchise.

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