Solid data management skills back John’s Incredible Pizza and now Burrissimo.
JIPC Management Inc., which manages both chains, employs five full-time programmers, along with three information technology workers who created the company’s point-of-sale system, write all codes, and were responsible for creating the Burrisimo customer rewards point app.
“Everything at John’s and Burrissimo is internal to us,” said John Parlet, founder of John’s Incredible Pizza. “What I found was that John’s is a really crazy and unique concept, and we do a lot of very interesting things and we serve a lot of guests. We will serve on any given Saturday over 3,000 guests in Buena Park.”
Proprietary software helps the company make smart decisions on scheduling employees—based on weather patterns or past trends—or when to prompt workers to start grilling chicken or pizzas based on the anticipated number of customers expected to walk through the door.
Parlet receives emails daily at 2 p.m., 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. that show how many customers have walked through the door compared to projections.
Coding in-house for Parlet dates back to 1985 when he founded Ridgecrest-based China Lake Systems, named after the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division’s base at China Lake in the Mojave Desert.
The company developed RapidFire, a point-of-sale system developed for three pizza parlors Parlet owned at the time. The system took pizza orders from customers using light pens before the proliferation of touchscreens, and was eventually used in about 3,000 restaurants nationally.
Parlet sold RapidFire to an employee who later sold China Lake to Radiant Technologies Inc. for $7 million.
China Lake Systems made Parlet realize the value of computers and technology in the business he does today.
“I can’t write code,” Parlet said. “I’m a businessman; I’m somewhat of an entrepreneur, and I recognized the value in taking that dumb box and making it do something really unique and said, ‘Hey, I’m willing—I don’t have the brains to do it, but I’ll hire somebody that does have the brains to do it.’ And to this day I still respect the value of computers, and that’s why I have five full-time programmers.”
—Kari Hamanaka
