Barbecue and Big Data do not seem to be the most natural bedfellows – but one U.S. restaurant chain has thrown them together to increase sales and its understanding of the customer.

Dickeys Barbecue Pit, which operates 514 restaurants across the U.S., has worked with big data and business intelligence service providers iOLAP to develop a proprietary system it calls Smoke Stack. Smoke Stack crunches data from point-of-sale systems, marketing promotions, loyalty programs, customer surveys and inventory systems to provide near real-time feedback on sales and other key performance indicators.

Source: forbes.com
Author: Bernard Marr