Big Data is being applied to countless businesses these days, namely healthcare and finance.  But restaurants can get in on the fun, too, especially if there’s a way to leverage Big Data to incentivize employees.  Wikibon’s Dave Vellante caught up with Phil Beauregard, the founder and CEO of Objective Logistics, at the Technology Underwriting Greater Good (TUGG) conference in Boston, to learn more about it.

Objective Logistics develops software for point of sale (POS) systems found in retail stores and restaurants. The startup taps into transactional data and employee-related information on the client’s POS infrastructure to rank sales personnel based on their performance, and offer rewards to the most disciplined workers.   The solution allows businesses to improve customer experience by giving their sales representatives incentives to do their jobs well year-round.

According to Beauregard, his startup’s offering can prove especially valuable for companies that rely on commission-based work: for example, restaurant chains with fleets of waiters.  Objective Logistics’ software is built around non-monetary compensation, but certain rewards, such as the option to change shifts (from a slow mid-week morning to Friday night) can have a direct impact on a server’s paycheck.

Beauregard, a mathematician and economist who worked as a waiter in his teenage years, compares his company’s technology with a Mars rover: it gets in, collects the data, and beams it off to HQ.

“It sits halfway on the POS, and half way in our cloud, and it translates all this information for us. And then we have a very nice frontend software-as-a-service web portal where waiters and waitresses and managers can log in and see it on their mobile phone or on their home computer.”

Beauregard says that, because different companies have different needs, his startup’s platform is versatile enough to be customizable without making things too complicated for the end user. He then tells Vellante that he “sure as hell” plans on open-sourcing the software at some point, but adds that at this stage his company is only focused on getting more customers and bringing new talent aboard.

See the full interview below:

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc