Au Bureau relies on monday.com to coordinate dozens of new restaurant openings

About Au Bureau

The flagship brand of Groupe Bertrand, the Au Bureau concept was born in France in 1989. Inspired by London pubs, it presents itself as a pub, brasserie and restaurant.

Au Bureau offers its customers food and drinks for every time of day, in an authentic and welcoming setting. The brand has more than 135 locations and plans around twenty new openings every year.

Every new opening is a major project that requires flawless organization and meticulous follow-up. In this context, monday.com proved to be the ideal tool.

In search of the perfect tool

Julien Erisay, Franchise Project Manager for the Au Bureau brand, oversees the opening of some twenty franchise locations a year.

In 2018, his team was looking for a tool to optimize project management from start to finish. Until then, the teams handled “construction on one side, negotiations and hiring on the other, all in folders that weren’t connected to each other. It was far from optimal,” explains Julien Erisay.

The new tool would need to centralize all the information related to managing construction, hiring and the opening as a whole… It would also need to give access to all project teams (project managers, for example) and support teams (operations directors, regional managers). They pictured the ideal tool and agreed on a three-word definition: concise, relevant and easy to use.

Discovering monday.com

Configuring and customizing the tool

Julien and his team discovered monday.com through the trial version offered by the vendor. They spent a few weeks configuring the tool to find the right board structure. Their goal: give the teams a turnkey tool that would be effortless to adopt.

The teams discover monday.com

Everyone adopted the new tool with ease.
Today, they all agree they could no longer do without monday.com, since it has revolutionized the way they work. “The team really does see time savings every day,” confirms Julien Erisay.

The tool’s full mobility is a real strength: the operations teams, who are on the road most of the time, appreciate being able to use monday.com on their iPad or phone.
The team keeps customizing the tool as projects and use cases evolve, based on everyone’s constraints and needs.

Key features used

My week: gathers all the tasks assigned to you and lets you see at a glance everything your team needs to get done this week and next week, and even what is overdue.

Timeline: lets you visualize how your projects are organized over time and sort them by owner, priority or any other predefined parameter.

The “guests” feature: thanks to shareable boards, you can invite outside partners to follow or contribute to project progress.

“Our users invited as ‘guests’ are usually people outside the team but inside the company, with whom we want to share only a few boards,” explains Julien Erisay. He adds: “We use almost every feature monday.com offers!” And specifies: “As soon as we’ve added more numerical data, we’ll use even more features, especially the Formula column*”

* Formula = lets you run calculations across several columns, much like Excel cells, for example to measure performance.

Thanks to the way monday.com centralizes all information, the project team has regained control over overall project tracking, ensuring much better coordination across all teams.