Leading Franchise Operator Partners with KeelCo to Maximize Microsoft Dynamics GP
Headquartered in Virginia Beach, VA, BurgerBusters Inc. is one of the largest Taco Bell franchise operators in the United States. With locations spanning Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, BurgerBusters employs over 4,200 employees.
BurgerBusters’ growth has been rapid. Its founder started with one Taco Bell on April 01, 1987, increased to approximately 95 restaurants in 2016 and currently owns and operates more than 150 Taco Bell restaurants including free-standing Taco Bells, Taco Bell/Pizza Hut Express restaurants, Taco Bell/KFC restaurants, and Taco Bell/Long John Silver restaurants.
Growing Pains
At the beginning of 2017, Jennifer Korbely was brought onboard BurgerBusters to fulfill the role of company Controller. At the time, the company was managing accounts payable, payroll, cash forecasting, GL, and fixed assets for nearly 100 restaurants as though there were still fewer than a dozen stores. Processes were incredibly inefficient, making it nearly impossible for Jennifer’s team of ten to keep up and effectively address the volume of work facing them. As a result, they were consistently several months behind in issuing financial statements for the restaurants.
“Things were in a state of disarray,” says Jennifer. “When I arrived the first priority was to understand the systems we had in place and fix them to work for us.” While BurgerBusters had implemented Microsoft Dynamics GP over 20 years before, the ERP capabilities had not been re-evaluated and were seldomly adjusted to meet ever-changing needs as operations continued to scale.
There were several critical processes that were broken. For example, Jennifer found they were accessing 17 separate databases in order to post recurring journal entries, run depreciation, and perform many other activities. This resulted in an inordinate amount of time wasted to manage these tasks, as well as a higher probability of errors due to the number of steps and system clicks required. In the case of BurgerBusters, databases needed to be merged to increase efficiency.
Recommitting to GP
“We still wanted to work with GP, but our previous Microsoft Dynamics VAR didn’t provide the follow-up and skills necessary to support our growth strategy,” says Jennifer. “That’s when KeelCo came onboard and helped us with everything that needed to be remedied.”
Together with Jennifer and her team, KeelCo accomplished nearly ten major projects over a three-year period, modifying processes and leveraging additional GP functionality and best-practice tools to help BurgerBusters achieve a greater level of efficiency and control. The 17 databases were consolidated, duplicative data and redundant input routines were eliminated, disparate systems were integrated, time-saving GP and third-party tools were deployed, and payroll systems were brought in-house. In relative short order, BurgerBusters’ back office systems were finally tuned to handle existing requirements with the flexibility to scale as new stores or groups of stores are added.
As a result of the partnership with KeelCo, BurgerBusters data-input has decreased by countless hours each week. BurgerBusters also saved hundreds of thousands of dollars annually by bringing payroll in-house and gained an improved automated experience that benefits the corporate team and each restaurant’s management staff.
“With the help of KeelCo, we have cleaned up the mess we inherited and created an environment that allows us to look to the future with greater confidence,” says Jennifer. “We could not have done it without their team. The level of care and expertise KeelCo provides is unbeatable. With the worst behind us, we’re onto additional projects that will only increase our ability to improve performance and profitability.”
“Hats off to leadership at BurgerBusters; they identified the challenges and opportunities, quickly moved to hire the right internal resources, engaged with KeelCo, and were open to new ideas for utilizing more of the software they already owned. I am proud we could be part of the transformation for BurgerBusters and excited for what the future holds for our partnership.”
– Brian Keel, President, KeelCo