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See how Keboola helps this restaurant chain use data to drive growth and profits
With Keboola, Pincho Nation can:
Established in 2012, Pincho Nation has reimagined the dining experience with its unique concept. Since then, it has swiftly expanded to 70 outlets. This innovative restaurant chain puts customers first, offering them the convenience of ordering and paying through an app to significantly reduce their waiting time and improve service satisfaction.
However, there's more to Pincho Nation than meets the eye. From marketing to software development, the company manages all of its operations in-house, always striving to surprise and delight its customers. Data is their secret sauce - their catalyst for growth.
We talked to Ronnie Persson, CTO at Pincho Nation, who's played a key role in the company’s data strategy from the get-go. Let's explore how data insights fuel Pincho Nation's growth and customer satisfaction.
As a lean data team of two, Ronnie and his teammate managed a complex data stack:
Ronnie and his colleague were responsible for integrating all data sources and conducting complex transformations to turn the raw data into insights.
The duo was faced with a significant problem: they needed to upgrade their data transformation pipeline, which had been developed in-house. With an expanding number of transformations managed by just two people, the data operations began to buckle under the strain.
Their current system provided minimal visibility into data syncs, making it incredibly challenging to debug issues or pinpoint the source of errors. This lack of transparency often led to unnoticed issues until a team member identified missing data in Power BI.
These hurdles signaled that their existing operations weren't scalable, prompting a search for a better, more efficient solution.
Ronnie explored several alternatives, including Microsoft Azure Pipelines, but found them either overly complicated or lacking sufficient integration endpoints.
But then they found Keboola.
“I immediately liked Keboola. It felt like a new product. It wasn’t burdened with all the legacy tech stuff. We have a lot of new tech as well. So it’s a good fit.”
After evaluating several vendors, Keboola was the clear winner thanks to its:
All of these aspects and more made Keboola the ideal choice for Pincho Nation.
“What sealed the deal for us was that Keboola offered the flexibility of using both Python and SQL for transformations, the visual flows that simplify the insights into complex data pipelines, and their amazing support.”
A specific example stands out…
When Ronnie discovered a bug in a recent feature from MongoDB that wasn't compatible with Keboola's MongoDB integration, the support team resolved it promptly. This level of responsiveness to error corrections left a significant impression on the CTO.
Let’s take a look at five major use cases where Keboola moved the needle for Pincho Nation.
Keboola enabled Pincho Nation to gain visibility and control over its data operations with:
This directly led to increased data accuracy, allowing decision makers to place more trust in their data.
“The biggest change I noticed with Keboola is that I have more control over the data, which helps me to achieve more, to implement new use cases. And I see my coworkers have more trust in data now.”
Pincho Nation grappled with the challenge of automating its communication with customers.
The team relies on push notifications to their app and other channels, but the process is complex; they must consolidate data from multiple production databases (MongoDB, ElasticSearch), enrich it with customer data (CRM), and transform it into Snowflake before they can create a holistic customer profile. This involves many complex transformations to ensure accuracy.
Additionally, they have to convert customer-tailored data and communication nuggets into XML files using Python transformations and push them to the app using FTP.
This is where Keboola's incremental loading capabilities came to their rescue. The team can now quickly move data from one system to another while making sure the system doesn’t crash or slow down under the strain of high data volumes. This end-to-end pipeline automation with Keboola has enabled them to simplify complex data transformation tasks and speed up data syncs.
“Keboola helps us save on many fronts: we could let go of many obsolete databases for storage, and we don't need consultants to help develop transformations. We even removed an ad for a data engineer and decided to hire a front-end developer instead, because Keboola is so easy to use that we can achieve more with the existing in-house talent.”
Pincho Nation utilizes Power BI for its business intelligence needs, but creating data tables for Power BI reports was a tough task. With multiple data sources to unify and varying data granularities, the data cleaning and aggregation process was time-consuming, to say the least.
Using Keboola, Pincho Nation has automated the production of 30+ tables that can immediately be consumed by Power BI and transformed into insight-rich reports.
The result? A new report development cycle halved from four weeks to just two.
“I’m constantly automating my data work with Keboola. There is a great hunger for data within the organization. Keboola helps me deliver on those high expectations.”
With Keboola’s automation, Ronnie's team found time to experiment with new data use cases.
One such example involved an A/B test on Pincho Nation's app, where they experimented with different pricing presentations.
With Keboola, they were able to iterate quickly and collect data about overall order values.
The results led to a profitable discovery. One pricing example produced an average increase in total orders of €0.42 per guest. When annualized, this translates into a six-figure revenue boost.
Pincho Nation is not just a restaurant chain, but also a franchise. A large part of the brand's strategy is to help franchisees succeed.
Ronnie and his team wanted to share success stories and provide reports highlighting profits by location, enabling franchisees to learn from top-performing locations.
However, integrating data from different sources and keeping it updated was challenging.
With Keboola's automation, Pincho Nation solved this problem. They consolidated data and created reports showing profits by location, which has enabled franchises to learn, improve, and increase their profits.
The business impact has been significant. For example, one location increased its profits by improving staff management, while another identified and addressed food wastage issues, reducing unnecessary expenditure. And that’s not all. Sharing information about property values has helped them to negotiate better rental deals.
With Keboola, Ronnie was able to scale data operations, deliver more with fewer people, and lower operational costs, including data storage costs.
“Before I had to say ‘no’ to many requests. Now I can deliver easily.”
Moving forward, Pincho Nation plans to scale Keboola’s use cases across the organization:
“Keboola strikes a good balance between easy-to-use and powerful transformation. But even if you get stuck, Keboola’s support is amazing and can help you move along.”
Curious about what Keboola can do for your business?
Give us a shout and we can help you discover new ways to turn your data into business growth.
