May 10, 2007 10:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time

HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Church's Chicken®, one of the world's largest QSR chicken concepts, has selected MIRUS for its Exception-Based Restaurant Management service, a business intelligence solution that will help Church's become even more efficient in running its business globally. By making the MIRUS service available to its 250 corporate locations, Church's will get more detailed working data that will enable the brand to gain insight into customers' purchasing habits and needs, and daily data control to improve operations.

The contract with concept owner Cajun Operating Company makes MIRUS's service available to all its stores globally. The company and its franchisees operate 1,750+ stores that are branded Church's Chicken® in 31 US states, whereas 16 countries are operating currently as Church's Chicken® or Texas Chicken®. The company just passed $1 billion in global system sales, a milestone that was achieved in the 52-week period ending February 25, 2006.

President and CEO Harsha V Agadi said, "Church's has been extremely pleased with MIRUS's benefits to date. Its Exception-Based Restaurant Management solution demonstrated that by making exceptions visible above the store, we can create value for our shareholders and our operators beyond that which a traditional back office can provide." Led by Agadi, the Church's Chicken® team successfully piloted MIRUS's food cost module beginning in late 2006, to see how MIRUS could help reduce food costs.

"We reduced food costs more than one percent in our pilot market in three months - a savings of more that $1 million annualized across our corporate restaurants - thanks to the waste reduction that resulted from MIRUS's exception-based reporting and smart dashboards," noted Church's COO Jim Parrish. "Now we're looking forward to implementing the total MIRUS solution throughout our organization, including labor management, customer metrics and guest check imaging. We're very excited about how this technology will allow us to make smart decisions with products and promotions that will fit our customers' needs."

Alan Stukalsky, Church's CIO, said, "We needed a solution that would give us a better view of the business. We reviewed 10 business intelligence apps, initially piloted two, then quickly narrowed the decision to one partner: MIRUS." Church's Chicken® is a category leader in capitalizing on innovative IT and business intelligence technologies. The company has saved about 40% of its IT infrastructure management costs so far with such innovations. Such savings have freed up capital for Church's to open 20 new restaurants that will generate about $20 million of sales annually, according to President/CEO Agadi in a Computerworld magazine article in January.

The MIRUS web-delivered "software-as-a-service" will help Church's quickly incorporate huge amounts of data that used to be locked up in the stores. Exceptions to operating parameters will be made available enterprise-wide. As a result, managers on all levels can generate more actionable, more convenient information about their units. The MIRUS service has already proven itself in major national and regional brand restaurant operations.

Tom Sacco, MIRUS's Vice-President of Sales, said, "This is a great opportunity for MIRUS. Church's is a number-one icon brand, and chicken is slightly different than other QSRs. In the burger segment for example, companies focus on per-person transactions based on food items. In chicken, it's meals. Church's is dealing with larger quantities of food, where the opportunity for error is greater: so MIRUS Exception-Based Restaurant Management is exceptionally useful."

Dave Bennett, President of MIRUS, stated, "The management of the chicken segment has unique, complex challenges. Church's has already done a masterful job of consolidating the brand and growing it. We're thrilled to be a small but important contributor to their ongoing success."

Founded in San Antonio, Texas, in 1952, Church's Chicken® is a highly recognized brand name in the QSR sector and is one of the largest quick-service chicken concepts in the world. Church's Chicken® serves freshly prepared, high quality, flavorful chicken and tenders with signature sides and hand-made-from-scratch biscuits at low prices. It differentiates itself from its competitors in care and attention given in preparation of food, and is positioned as the Value Leader in the Chicken QSR category. As of February 2007, the Church's system had 1,600 locations worldwide in 18 countries, with system sales exceeding $1 billion. To learn more about Church's Chicken, visit http://www.churchs.com.

Headquartered in Houston, TX, MIRUS is the industry leader in exception-based restaurant management solutions. It pioneered the delivery of applications over the Internet with its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). It offers web-based solutions, with usage- or subscription-based pricing, to help food-service companies and multi-unit operators drive profits and run their businesses more efficiently.