Crafting The Supply Chain

Savvy supply chain management steers craftworks holdings into the future

With nine distinct specialty restaurant brands serving the nation, CraftWorks Holdings knows a little something about the power of dynamic supply chain management. Their brands include Logan’s Roadhouse, Old Chicago Pizza and Taproom, Rock Bottom Restaurants and Breweries, and Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurants, as well as a slate of high-concept eateries such as ChopHouse, Seven Bridges Grill and Brewery, and A1A Ale Works.

In November of last year, CraftWorks Restaurants and Breweries acquired Logan’s Roadhouse to form CraftWorks Holdings, a unified platform for their brands. In 2016, prior to its acquisition by CraftWorks, Logan’s reorganized under Chapter 11 to emerge with a new leadership mindset across all functions.

At the nexus of these identities is Logan’s Roadhouse former Chief Supply Chain Officer, Randy Scruggs. As CraftWorks’ CSCO, Scruggs and his teams pull together a complex network of commodity and specialty suppliers and distributors to serve 390 locations in 40 states and the District of Columbia. As one of only two members of the holding company’s leadership group to have worked through Logan’s reorg, Scruggs lends a valuable perspective to the brands journey.

“We knew we had a really workable brand that we all believed in, we had just not done the brand justice,” Scruggs said of Logan’s, adding that deficiencies spread across product selection, labor management, and culture. “Luckily, our Leadership Team knew that to turn the brand around we needed to walk back a lot of the changes that the brand had done to try to keep up with the times, cut costs, or manage a P&L over some of the harder years that casual dining went through.