Moon's mission: Controlling CPK's POS platform overhaul

Nation's Restaurant News, Dec 13, 1999 by Alan Liddle

California Pizza Kitchen Inc. long ago established its reputation as an innovator among wood-fired pizza makers, but the company's director of information services, Kevin James Moon, isn't too interested in trendy technology.

Having spent the past year in developing a companywide virtual private network, or VPN, and recent months in enhancing that VPN through a move to high-speed digital subscriber line, or DSL, service, Moon is no stranger to contemporary IT trends and challenges. However, he indicated that he is not ready to lead the technology-arms race.

"We continually make sure we're not far behind on upgrades, but we don't want to be on the 1.0 version of anything," the transplanted native of Canada noted.

Moon, 41, joined CPK in October 1998 after working for Deloitte & Touche in that accounting and consulting firm's Los Angeles "solutions practice." Before that he was with Deloitte and Touche Business Systems Consulting in Toronto.

"I was working with CPK on the implementation of the financial-management system and really enjoyed the staff here. They needed an IT director, and it seemed like a good fit," Moon said, explaining how he came to work at the chain of 18 franchised and 73 franchisor-owned full-service pizza, pasta and salad restaurants.

H. Carrie Carrington, CPK executive vice president and chief financial officer, is Moon's boss. He said that while his director of IS "came in under some difficult circumstances, he has done a tremendous job."

"Kevin had a full plate this year, but the most significant project involved replacing our POS system companywide," the Carrington remarked.

Moon said he is proud of the eight-month overhaul of California Pizza Kitchen's POS platform. He explained that the new Windows NT 4.0 system is from Hospitality Solutions International, or HSI, and it comprises IBM 4695 touchscreen terminals with Pentium II processors, 65 megabytes of RAM and 1.2 gigabyte hard drives. The terminals are connected to Compaq Proliant 740 servers with Pentium chips and two mirrored 2 gigabyte hard drives.

Store-level manager workstations also run NT 4.0 and are Compaq Presario 5280 PCs with Intel Celeron 400 megahertz processors, 96 megabytes of RAM and 10 gigabyte hard drives, Moon reported. Residing on the workstation drives, he said, are Microsoft Office 97 Professional Suite and custom-written Microsoft Access applications for tracking and managing sales and cash, food cost and labor.

Moon said Sterling Commerce's CONNECT:Remote is used for polling sales, food costs and labor data from the restaurants and also serves as a tool for "publishing to the stores standard forms and other documents."

The ongoing development of CPK's virtual private network represents the company's greatest technological challenge, Moon said. The troubling issues, he explained, "are really related to finding reliable Internet service providers and encryption software and hardware."

"Unexplained disconnections" and ISPs that couldn't supply toll-free connection points for some of the restaurants have been among the factors contributing to CPK's "disappointing" VPN experience so far, Moon confided.

"To address local connectivity issues, we have implemented DSL service at 90 percent of our sites; and as that service becomes available at the remaining locations, we will install it," he said.

As an alternative to the encrypted Bay Networks software now being used for the VPN, Moon said he is considering trying client-to-network access using Microsoft's Point to Point Tunneling Protocol, or MPPTP. However, he acknowledged that such an approach might require hardware firewalls for security at a cost of about $400 per store.

Up to this point, Moon said, the VPN "definitely has not been a cost saver." The good news, he added, is that "DSL has definitely been a cost saver."

Asked about technology initiatives that have greatly benefited CPK, Moon pointed to the evolving 3-year-old corporate data warehouse running on Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Data mining is accomplished using a combination of Hummingbird's BI-Query and Cognos' Impromptu, he said.

The warehouse, Moon said, gives CPK "the ability to get reliable financial and operating information about our stores and the company as a whole quickly." Having that data at hand, he added, enables "all levels of management to act more quickly when a problem appears and to perform more critical and sensitive analysis."

Moon said that with the exception of an IBM AS400 mini computer "that holds up a counter," all servers at headquarters are Compaq Proliant brand PCs, with model numbers ranging from the 200s to 7000, which sports four Pentium processors and a full gigabyte of RAM.

As part of his duties, Moon oversees the company's telecommunications technologies. Along those lines, he is high on CPK's unified messaging system, which lets users receive voice mail as WAV sound files and faxes as attachments to e-mail files. The system uses Microsoft Exchange server for storage and Outlook for distribution.