News
HyperActive Technologies reports upward sales trend
November 13, 2008
PITTSBURGH — Despite the recent flurry of reports about financial and economic gloom, Pittsburgh-based HyperActive Technologies expects its year-over-year revenues will multiply by more than 400 percent this year to more than $4 million, the company announced. The company maintains a "cautious optimism" about its ability to continue an upward growth trend for the next several years.
HyperActive Technologies is the creator of "HyperActive Bob," the predictive food production manager developed by robotic scientists from CMU, along with several other intelligent solutions for quick-service restaurants.
HyperActive chairman and CEO Joseph Porfeli said the company has "turned a corner, from being a start-up software company to the point at which we are a significant technology provider to the QSR industry." For example, CKE, parent of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, Arby's and International Dairy Queen all have named HyperActive Technologies as a "preferred" or "exclusive" provider of one or more types of QSR technology.
"We did two things over the last year to strengthen our position in this industry," Porfeli said. "We continued to develop Bob and tailor the implementations to specific chains, improving the likelihood of adoption of this new and innovative technology, and we made ourselves more effective as a provider to this industry by acquiring related products, complementary to Bob, that QSRs are already adopting on a widespread basis."
Porfeli, an investor and CEO who has successfully guided a number of technology companies through start-up phases and into varying degrees of commercial viability, says that HyperActive's vision has been to add value for QSRs by providing products that "surround the restaurant with technologies that enhance the customer's experience."
HyperActive's new products include
- "QTimer," a drive-thru speed-of-service timer that aggregates data and provides useful, web-based reports and summaries QSR chains use to measure the effectiveness of their drive-thru operations
- "HyperTrack", a vision-based drive-thru management system that adds a sensing component to its timer solution, the only one of its kine on the market and
- "HyperView," an order confirmation board (OCB) that enables consumers to verify the accuracy of their orders.
The QTimer "really helps us and we're excited about it," said Bob Wooldridge, senior systems manager for Boddie-Noell restaurants, a Hardee's franchisee with 350 restaurants. "It will help us to understand more of where our issues lie with the drive-thru, and help us to pinpoint bottlenecks. The Web-page reporting dashboard is a very useful tool that provides ‘exception reporting' — top five and bottom five restaurants, for example, so that top level managers can see instantly which stores to reward and identify any specific issues that are causing slowdowns. We can look at those bottom five and drill down deeper into their results, see daypart reports, and even research specific menu items that are causing difficulties. It's a very useful tool that saves us quite a bit of time."
HyperActive's HyperView order confirmation board is distinguished by features which add screen clarity and durability, as well as a network-based updating tool that gives chains the ability to change the images that are displayed for different parts of the day (breakfast vs. lunch, for example) and for any promotions that are being run chain-wide.
"Organizations can send out images to one location or a thousand from a single, centralized portal," Porfeli said.
HyperActive Bob still primary
HyperActive Bob remains the company's flagship solution. One regional chain has implemented Bob system-wide, and several others have market-tested Bob and are poised to significantly expand their use of the product.
Zaxby's, a regional chicken chain headquartered in Athens, Ga., found that Bob was responsible for producing high quality food more consistently than the best managers — and for reductions in food costs and training costs. Zaxby's has implemented Bob in all of its corporate-owned restaurants, and its franchisee community continues to implement Bob in more stores every month.
Barry Guffey, a North Carolina-based owner/operator of Zaxby's restaurants, said that HyperActive Bob helps reduce food costs and cooking more food than is needed.
"Bob also speeds up our drive-thru during peak hours, because we always have the right amount of food on hand," Guffey said. "We don't cook too much, and we don't run out."
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