Mitchells & Butlers creates new digital revenue streams with Dynatrace

UK-based restaurant and pub operator Mitchells and Butlers (M&B) is on a mission to digitally transform. As the company emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic and reopened its 1,700 locations across the UK, it continues to identify new opportunities for growth. With the UK home delivery market expanding, M&B wanted to drive new digital revenue streams by establishing its own virtual brands, while continuing to deliver excellent customer experiences in its traditional venues.

To achieve these goals, M&B needed more extensive observability and business analytics across its environment. The company had adopted Dynatrace at the onset of the digital expansion and therefore had access to an automatic and intelligent observability solution, but it now needed to extend these capabilities even further to unlock new insights.

When initially selecting an observability solution, M&B was particularly impressed by Dynatrace’s causal AI engine, Davis, due to its ability to provide real time answers about the cause and solution to any performance issues. Following the exceptional results achieved with these capabilities – including the achievement of 100% application availability – M&B chose to extend its use of the platform. It chose to begin using Dynatrace’s new Grail data lakehouse technology, to access powerful business analytics.

“Since the pandemic, we’ve experienced exponential growth in the delivery market,” says Mark Forrester, Digital Readiness Manager at M&B. “Use of our apps and online platform has also increased, with customers using it to do everything from booking tables to ordering food and drink. Dynatrace had already helped us perfect the order-at-table customer experience, where we saw a 20% increase in purchase value compared to bar orders. As we grew and added new digital revenue streams, it was imperative that we continued to deliver excellent customer experiences and we knew Dynatrace could provide the insights we needed.”

• Faster integrations with delivery partners: M&B was the first UK chain to have its own API layer, which means orders from third-party delivery companies, such as Deliveroo, Just Eat, and Uber Eats, flow directly into the restaurant group’s point-of-sale systems. Insights from Dynatrace enabled M&B to speed up the rollout of these integrations with delivery companies, giving the company a significant competitive advantage.
• Deeper insights and real-time reporting: With the business events data captured in Grail, Dynatrace is providing M&B with answers to critical business questions at the click of a button, saving teams valuable time. Teams can now produce unreconciled insight reports on areas such as sales revenue that are accurate to the penny in real time, or weekly totals of staff tips from digital services. Previously, M&B would have had to gather data from each of the 1,700 outlets and collate it into one report—a time-consuming process. With Dynatrace’s Grail technology and automation, the data is extracted and waiting for consumption automatically.
• Solve elusive and costly issues: Dynatrace Grail has also helped M&B identify and resolve an issue that led to ‘ghost orders’, which had eluded its team for years. In these situations, a customer payment would be declined due to a POS system failure, yet the order would still go through and come to their table. By finding and resolving the cause of these ghost orders, M&B has improved customer service by eliminating the confusion this may have caused and can better protect its bottom line.
• Supporting new digital revenue streams: Using Dynatrace’s AI-powered insights, M&B has been able to launch a range of virtual brands—delivery-only food outlets utilizing their existing restaurant kitchens – to tap into a rapidly growing market. Dynatrace has helped M&B streamline these virtual brands’ business processes and track the end-to-end user journey, from placing an order to delivery. Teams can see how many orders are going through in real time and quickly identify and resolve any issues or transaction failures.
• Deliver better customer experiences: Dynatrace alerts teams to issues with third-party apps so they can pass on the information immediately to ensure continuous performance and availability. Previously, teams would need to wait for external developers to identify issues, resulting in an app being down for extended periods.

“Dynatrace has helped Mitchells and Butlers complement its traditional bricks-and-mortar bar and restaurant company with a growing, innovative, digital business,” says Forrester. “As we have evolved, so has our use of the Dynatrace platform. By adding Grail, we have gained a profound level of insight into our business, enabling us to overcome challenges with ease, streamline our processes and meet our ambitious growth plans. All of this would have been a lot harder without Dynatrace.”