Pizza Boys Grow Up, Build Caribbean Dynasty with OSAS

At the southernmost point of the Caribbean archipelago, the twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago is home to a thriving tourism industry, a revived gas and oil mining boom, and an emergent agricultural renaissance. Thanks to the efforts of Mario and Norman Sagba Aboud, it is also a great place to grab a burger or a slice of pizza.

Under the Aboud brothers’ creative entrepreneurship, the Pizza Boys group of companies has ballooned from a single restaurant in Port-of-Spain to a homegrown food dynasty of 120 restaurants. And as they celebrate their 25th year, they aren’t only about Pizza and Burgers anymore; in addition to 16 Pizza Boys locations, their restaurants cover break time fare (Donut Boys and Rituals Coffee Houses), Chinese food (Wok ‘n’ Roll and Imperial Garden restaurants), gourmet bakery goods (Vie de France franchise locations), and chicken take-out (Church’s Chicken franchise locations).

The Beginning of a Profitable Friendship

As their company expanded in the late ‘80s, the Sagba Aboud brothers realized that they would need a powerful accounting and inventory backbone to keep their growing company thriving. Norman Sagba Aboud reminisces about picking Open Systems’ OSAS accounting solution off of the shelf at a Computerland store on the advice of his accountants. “We’ve never looked back,” says Aboud. “And as we continue to grow, OSAS grows with us.”

Fine-Tuned Profitability Reporting

Today, Pizza Boys employs over 1,000 people, making them one of the largest employers in the Caribbean. With 118 locations to manage, their head office and distribution center in Port-of-Spain uses OSAS to keep track of the needs of each shop. “Each location is set up as a division so we can track profit and loss by individual units,” said Aboud. “We can track how profitable each store is.” Such reporting is built into OSAS. “What’s nice is that OSAS does it automatically; we’ve set the batches, and we click a button and it just runs everything. It’s so nice.”

Inventory: Here Today, Gone Later Today

With the short shelf life, managing food inventory for over one-hundred locations is no small feat. “90% of our inventory turns within three weeks,” said Aboud, “so there’s constantly stuff going in and out.” The size and variety of shipments and purchase orders is not a problem for OSAS “The system handles as large an amount as we can put in. It’s very robust.”

In spite of the fact that their raw materials come from all over the world, OSAS also takes away the headache of multi-currency issues. “We bring stuff from New Zealand, England, US, China, and we reconvert everything to our base currency,” said Aboud.

Growing Throughout the Caribbean and Into the Future

Pizza Boys and its restaurants can now be found in Jamaica, Curacao, Dominica, Guyana, and most of the English-speaking Caribbean, and they’re only growing from there. Throughout their growth, Pizza Boys has taken advantage of software maintenance to use new OSAS features as they become available, creating even greater value in their investment. “We’ve used OSAS since the early ‘90s,” said Aboud. “It has continued to evolve each year, and as continue to we grow, so does the product. The software was extremely stable then and continues to be extremely stable. What’s great about it is that every year they seem to think of all the things that we want, and in the new release it’s already been put in.”