The Data Existed. Nothing Was Being Done About It.
Legacy F&B — managed by Neal Wadhwa, Managing Partner and Wendy's Franchise Association board member — operates 20 Wendy's locations across Maine and Ohio. The business is built on a people-first philosophy: GMs and DMs empowered with clear direction, not just data dumps. But for years, the tools available couldn't bridge that gap. SBONet generated reports every day. The data existed. The mechanism to turn it into directed action did not.
District managers reviewed SBONet reports on Monday calls. GMs were told their numbers were off. Three weeks later, the same problems appeared in the same stores. The Legacy F&B team had experienced DMs, capable GMs, and a profitable operation — but without automated anomaly detection, prescribed actions, and accountability tracking, every week's conversation started from scratch.
The operational gaps compounding in silence:
- Chronic SOS overages — 4 stores Speed of service was running 380–533 seconds at four locations against Wendy's 280-second franchise target. Nobody could pinpoint root cause at the store level from SBONet data alone.
- Labor bleed — 7 Ohio stores Labor was running 2–4 percentage points over budget at seven Ohio locations. Estimated overage: $18,000/month in excess labor cost, driven largely by uncontrolled overtime with no real-time corrective mechanism.
- Undetected loss indicator — Store T One location's void rate jumped from 1.9% to 5.7% in a single week — a classic potential theft or discount abuse signal. Without automated monitoring, this would have gone undetected for weeks or months.
Connected, Analyzed, and Acting — in 15 Minutes.
Legacy F&B connected SBONet — the primary Wendy's back-office system — to Topline via native integration. No IT project. No data migration. No implementation consultant. Setup took 15 minutes. Within 24 hours, baseline reports were running across all 20 stores. Within one week, Neal had a complete operational intelligence picture he'd never had before — SOS trends, labor variance, void rates, and inventory variance, all in one automated weekly stack.
What Topline built in the first seven days:
- ✓ 12-week SOS trend analysis across all 20 stores — performance vs. brand target, week over week, segmented by store and market
- ✓ Labor variance vs. budget by store and by district manager — including OT breakdown and employee-level concentration analysis
- ✓ Inventory variance as % of net sales (full-week data only, to filter out physical count noise from partial-week reporting)
- ✓ Void rate monitoring with automated anomaly flagging — any week-over-week spike triggers an immediate alert and prescribed action
- ✓ Personalized GM Action Cards for each of the 20 store managers — a plain-English summary of their store's top 3 issues and exactly what to do about each one this week
The shift wasn't just in the data. It was in the accountability layer. For the first time, the operator could track not just what was wrong, but whether his DMs had done anything about it.
Four Problems Identified. Four Problems Solved.
Topline flagged Store T's void rate spike on Day 1 of Week 4. A 200%+ increase in a single week is a statistically significant anomaly — a potential indicator of cashier theft or unauthorized discount abuse.
"Pull the void report by employee. If 1–2 team members are driving the majority of voids, treat this as a potential theft investigation and notify your DM immediately."
One cashier was responsible for 74% of all voids. The issue was investigated and resolved. Void rate returned to 1.2% within two weeks.
Topline identified that labor overages were driven not by base scheduling errors but by uncontrolled overtime. Three stores had 40–77 hours of weekly OT concentrated in specific employees.
Required DM notification for any employee projected to exceed 35 hours by mid-week, enabling real-time schedule adjustments before OT was incurred.
OT hours down 60% within 3 weeks. Labor variance improved from +2.8% avg to +0.9% avg. Savings: ~$14,000/month across 7 stores.
Three Maine locations were chronically above Wendy's 280-second SOS franchise target — some by nearly 4 minutes. Topline's 12-week trend analysis revealed the problem was persistent, not seasonal — and that each store had a different root cause requiring a different GM Action Card.
Store-specific GM Action Cards: (1) Drive-thru window understaffed at lunch. (2) Order accuracy errors driving remakes. (3) Grill positioning inefficiency on high-volume items.
2 of 3 stores improved by >100 seconds within 4 weeks. The third store's persistent red-flagging over 6 weeks surfaced a GM performance issue that led to a leadership change.
Prior to Topline, there was no mechanism for the operator to verify that DM commitments made on Monday calls were followed through mid-week or by the following Monday. Actions were logged and forgotten.
Topline's accountability loop tracked every assigned action against its resolution status. Open items surfaced automatically in each week's operator report.
Of 12 actions logged in the first month, 9 were resolved within 2 weeks. The remaining 3 were escalated. Neal described this as "the first time I knew my team was actually following through."
$379,400 Identified. $120,000 Investment. Net ROI: $259,400.
| Metric | Before Topline | After 8 Weeks | Annual Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Excess labor cost (7 OH stores) | $18,400/month | $7,200/month | $134,400 saved |
| OT hours — full portfolio | 312 hrs/week | 124 hrs/week | $95,000 saved |
| Void rate — 2 flagged stores | 4.1% avg | 1.3% avg | $47,000 recovered |
| SOS improvement — 2 ME stores (target: 280s) | 447s avg | 281s avg | +104 cars/week ≈ $103,000 rev |
| Total Identified Impact | — | — | $379,400/year |
I'd been running 20 Wendy's stores for years and thought I knew what was going on. Topline showed me I was only seeing about 20% of the picture. The GM Action Cards alone changed the conversation with my team — instead of saying 'your numbers are off,' we could say 'here's exactly what to do today, and we'll know by next Monday if you did it.' That's the people-first approach we've always believed in — now backed by real-time data.
See what Topline finds in your Wendy's portfolio.
Free 30-day analysis across all your stores. We connect to SBONet in 15 minutes — no credit card, no commitment, no IT project. Neal will show you exactly what we find in your portfolio, in dollars.