In This article
At a Glance
Customer: Ampler Chicken (Franchisee of Church’s Texas Chicken)
Industry: Quick-Service Restaurants
Locations: 31 across Texas
Key Challenges: Theft, lack of visibility into transactions, incident response
Solutions: VIDEOiQ, DATAiQ, AUDITiQ
Results
- Reduced investigation time by 50%
- Detected and prevented internal theft
- Improved operational visibility and audit consistency
- Strengthened overall profitability and team accountability
About Ampler Chicken
Ampler Chicken, a multi-unit Church’s Texas Chicken franchisee based in Texas, operates over 85 restaurants across Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Arkansas. As Director of Operations, Sandra Garcia oversees the performance of five district managers and a team of training managers. Facing challenges common to quick-service restaurant operations: food cost control, labor optimization, and loss prevention. Sandra and her team turned to DTiQ over 5 years ago to bring visibility, accountability, and smarter decision-making to their daily operations.
Challenge
Before implementing DTiQ, Ampler struggled with several key pain points:
- Unexplained sales fluctuations between geographically close restaurants.
- High food and labor costs without clear insight into root causes.
- Limited visibility into refund and discount activity.
- Time-consuming manual audits and multi-system report monitoring.
- Garcia summarized the pre-DTiQ challenges as operational “blind spots” that made it difficult to pinpoint and correct inefficiencies quickly. “If one restaurant was down 20% while another nearby location was up, we needed a faster way to see why,” she explained.
Solution
Ampler Chicken adopted 50% of DTiQ’s tech stack more than five years ago, including VIDEOiQ, DATAiQ, and AUDITiQ:
- SmartAudit™ – Automated video-based restaurant evaluations customized by Ampler’s operations team.
- Refund & Discount Alerts – Real-time notifications for suspicious activity tied directly to video clips.
- Integrated Video and POS Data – Unified access allowing managers to click a transaction and instantly view corresponding footage.
Garcia herself customizes questions on DTiQ’s SmartAudits to match evolving operational priorities and collaborates closely with DTiQ’s Customer Experience team, including dedicated representatives who provide quarterly reviews, insights, and proactive support. Montly meetings take place with Sandra’s team take place to review data and ensure that they are getting the most out of DTiQ’s solutions and systems.
“DTiQ gives us everything in one place. If there’s a refund, I click it, see the video, and that’s it. I don’t need to pull reports from three different systems.”
Results
DTiQ now serves as a core operational tool across Ampler’s district management structure. The results have been tangible across multiple dimensions:
1. Loss Prevention and Accountability
- Multiple internal theft cases detected through forensic audits, including one where consistent under-ringing of sales led to immediate corrective action.
- Savings of up to $300–350 per incident discovered through targeted audits, illustrating strong ROI in short timeframes.
2. Operational Efficiency
- Time spent investigating transactions dropped by over 50%, allowing managers to focus on coaching and performance.
- Real-time access to comprehensive reports enables faster decision-making and sharper accountability across stores.
“Instead of spending 20–30 minutes pulling reports, my district managers can now spot-check in five minutes.”
3. Enhanced Oversight & Safety
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- Rapid retrieval and cloud-based storage of video clips have streamlined responses to police or insurance requests following incidents like altercations or break-ins.
- Managers now routinely monitor after-hours food removal, preventing losses and reinforcing accurate waste reporting.
Broader Impact
Although primarily designed to boost internal visibility, DTiQ has also had secondary benefits for guest experience and brand consistency. By embedding uniform appearance checks into audits, Ampler locations ensure employees meet brand standards that positively influence customer perception.
“Customers see team members in full uniform. DTiQ helps us make sure that happens.”
Ampler Chicken was looking for a way to drive accountability, transparency, and efficiency. DTiQ made managing operations simpler than ever before with our one dynamic platform. Sandra and her team are able to deep dive into the data, analyze, and identify areas of improvement. With our POS integration, it is now easier to review video per transaction. With SmartAudits, they are able to keep their stores clean, compliant, and safe.
They were able to realize even more benefits that DTiQ can offer, beyond what they were looking to achieve. By providing a truly end-to-end solution, Ampler is able to meet and exceed their operational goals, reduce incidents of loss, and improve compliance all while enhancing the customers’ experience.
Conclusion
Garcia is clear about the value DTiQ already provides:
“It’s an investment—and it works. The system’s only as good as how much you use it, and for us, it’s made operations easier, faster, and more transparent.”
