Customer Stories
Prevedere helps Whataburger determine market trends and plan for growth
Background
Whataburger is a fast-food restaurant chain with over 900 locations across 14 states, primarily in the southern U.S. Founded in Texas, the company has been in business for 75 years and is represented by a combination of corporate-owned and franchised restaurants. Whataburger generated more than $3 billion in revenue in 2022 from their restaurants and the sale of various retail products in grocery stores throughout the U.S.
Whataburger’s challenge
The organization faced two primary challenges. The first was inaccurate sales forecasts, primarily because their internal process relied heavily on historical data from their stores and franchisees, which had gaps. Whataburger wanted better financial forecasting insights to address this issue. The second challenge, common across various industries, was projecting wages and staffing for corporate restaurants and providing support to franchisee holders.
Prevedere’s Solution
Prevedere partnered with the finance team to initially understand sales outlooks specific to demographic market areas, with the intent of using this information to optimize their internally generated forecasts. The team has created 20 short-term (1-12 month) predictive models, for topline sales and sales by region/territory.
The outcome
Prevedere’s platform provides Whataburger an unbiased lens into all macroeconomic forces, highlighting those with the highest correlation – along with quantification of the lead time – to support in more impactful predictive modeling and forecasting.
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Whataburger is now able to quantify future sales specific to a demographic market area to support and improve internal forecasting - The HR team now has greater HCM-related insights to managing expenses, costs, and retention
- Predictive models were generated for each of the restaurant chain’s defined market areas, and those models helped the finance team forecast store sales within a 1-2% error margin
- Prevedere now enables more accurate and better-quality decision-making for budgeting and planning