Case Study: Au Bon Pain achieves 5‑minute forecasts and self-service data prep with Altair Knowledge Works' Monarch Complete

Self-Service Data Prep Key Ingredient for Au Bon Pain’s Success

Au Bon Pain, a Boston-based café chain with about 300 franchise and company-owned locations worldwide, relied on legacy COBOL systems that produced static reports and left the finance team dependent on IT to aggregate and analyze data. This made payroll tracking, cash reconciliation and budget forecasting slow and labor-intensive, with a year-long forecast taking up to two days to create and QA.

The company implemented Monarch Complete for self-service data preparation across cash reconciliation, payroll reporting, labor distribution and budget planning, enabling the team to combine legacy feeds, create calculated fields and run ad-hoc analyses without IT. As a result, forecasts that once took two days now take minutes, the finance team is more efficient and accurate, and IT is freed to focus on higher-value projects.

Au Bon Pain

Lorelei Fritsch

Director of Planning & Analysis