Dallas, TX -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/03/2015 -- Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants, Inc. is excited to announce the launch of Smoke Stack, a hosted cloud application which combines data from all of the over 500 restaurants and source systems. The new system replaced the fast casual chain's previous store-by-store reporting tool. It's being delivered by iOLAP, which combined Syncsort's DMX data integration software with Yellowfin's BI platform and Amazon Redshift for data warehousing.

"Staying fresh also means being on the fast track of new technology and Smoke Stack will allow us to query and analyze vital sales, labor, inventory and customer data quickly," said Roland Dickey, Jr., CEO of Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants, Inc. "Smoke Stack is also easy to use and we'll be able to seamlessly integrate the data technology into our everyday operations, introducing it to our owner operators across the country, all without painfully changing our day-to-day business processes."

The new system pulls data from point-of-sale systems and combines it with information about promotions, media buys, food purchasing patterns and inventory data, among other things. Currently, Smoke Stack has 175 corporate users and beta testers now, and Dickey's plans to roll it out to 350 restaurant operators next week.

The hosted cloud application, delivered by iOLAP, includes:

-Cloud-based Data Integration: Restaurant data is published to Amazon's Simple Storage Service, Amazon S3, and then parallel loaded into Amazon Redshift leveraging the lightweight, easy-to-use interface of Syncsort's data integration solution, DMX. The speed of DMX allows Dickey's to rapidly collect, transform and load thousands of very large files, with diverse data types from multiple servers across all of Dickey's locations, without performance bottlenecks.

-Cloud-ready Business Intelligence: Running on Linux server-based Amazon EC2 instances, Yellowfin's 100% Web-based, cloud-ready and highly scalable BI platform makes it easy and efficient for Dickey's to perform a new level of analytics. Non-technical business users can independently leverage the easy-to-use reporting and charting features to create stunning visualizations. Dickey's also uses the advanced analytics functions to measure their performance against key sales, labor, inventory costs and customer satisfaction KPIs.

-A Cloud-based Enterprise Data Warehouse: Amazon Redshift was a natural choice for cloud-based Enterprise Data Warehousing, allowing developers to quickly react to performance constraints using the many tools available within the Amazon Web Services platform. Performance expectations have been exceeded and Dickey's can cost-effectively adjust their storage needs as their data volumes grow.

-Cloud Model Pricing: Smoke Stack takes advantage of low-cost AWS data storage and processing, as well as Syncsort and Yellowfin's cloud pricing models, to deliver the entire solution cost-effectively.

"We are bringing a level of sophistication to the barbecue industry through big data, allocation of resources and predictive analytics that will allow us to serve our guests with a degree of modern precision," said Roland Dickey, Jr.

About Roland Dickey Jr.
Roland Dickey Jr. is the CEO of Dickey's Barbecue, and is responsible for creating the Dickey's barbecue franchise that grew the business from 20 to 500 stores in less than a decade. Dickey is passionate about barbecue and about business leadership, and tours the country talking at major events about how to create a vision for success and follow through.

For more information please visit: http://www.rolanddickeyjr.com/