How Fourth Added Analytics to Its Menu… and Realized a 117% ROI

Opening the door to analytics

Headquartered in London, Fourth is the world’s leading provider of cloud-based cost control solutions to the hospitality industry. Fourth customers have access to solutions in the areas of purchase-to-pay, inventory management, menu engineering, HR, labor productivity, and payroll.

Mike Shipley, Fourth’s Analytics & Insight Solutions Director, began his journey with the company as a customer. “We had a ton of data,” he recalls, “but we found it difficult to bring the information together and see the interdependencies and correlations.” The analytics packages that were available were beyond the budgets of most operations budgets. “Those who couldn’t afford it were doing everything in Excel,” Shipley says. Another problem lay in the distribution of the data, or lack thereof: “There was no easy way to get the data into the hands of all the different stakeholders for informed decision-making at various levels,” recalls Shipley.

Fourth recognized an opportunity to offer their customers an affordable, cloud-based distributed analytics solution to meet the needs — and fit the budgets — of the entire business chain in the hospitality industry. But first, they needed the right platform from the right partner.