Miguel Escobar, Director of Innovation and Efficiency at Shangri-La, oversees improvements meant to bring more value to the customer and the business alike. Unfortunately, that work was constantly getting interrupted by reactive, manual discrepancy investigations. “Our directors were spending a lot of time just watching video footage, and then trying to put all the other pieces together,” Escobar said.
Ron Hutto, IT and Security Manager, felt the same drag on his days. “Before Solink, I spent a lot of time combing through hours and hours of video footage trying to help with investigations,” he explained. Depending on the issue, those investigations could take as long as 7 hours.
The bigger cost wasn’t just time; it was opportunity. With directors and store teams tied up piecing together footage and data from other systems, there was little bandwidth left to look at the bigger picture: how stores were performing, where service was breaking down, or how to plan for growth.
Shangri-La had already tried to solve pieces of the problem on their own, building out data pipelines to keep transaction and inventory data accessible. But these fragmented solutions still missed the mark. “Solink added the layer we were missing, which is connecting video to the transactional data,” Escobar said.
The team chose Solink because it worked with their existing camera infrastructure, making it practical to scale across every location, and came with hands-on support. “The team made us feel confident and comfortable with adopting Solink as part of our operations,” Escobar noted.
With video and POS data now in one place, directors could go straight from a flagged transaction to the footage that explained it, with no toggling between systems. That connected view soon became the foundation for using data proactively to spot operational gaps, instead of only reacting after the fact.
The first win came during the pilot phase: an investigation that had eaten up more than 4 hours on the old system was solved in minutes with Solink. That pattern held. “Now, most discrepancy investigations are resolved within 15 minutes,” said Hutto. That’s a 96% reduction in manual review time that gave the team hours back each week.
The biggest shift for Shangri-La has been how they use that reclaimed time: identifying opportunities to improve processes and drive more revenue. For instance, pairing transaction data with video from lane cameras helped them pinpoint exactly why drive-thru service was slower than it should be, whether it was orders not being prepped in advance or staff stepping away from the window.
“We now know exactly what issues exist in the drive-thru, so we can make operational changes to improve turnaround times and ultimately process more clients in a day,” Escobar said. That visibility has also changed behavior on the floor: some stores have turned speed of service into friendly competition, with staff tracking their own drive-thru times.
At the leadership level, having a holistic view of the business is helping to guide resource planning as Shangri-La expands to new locations. Looking ahead, the team is also exploring how agentic AI could build on that foundation, surfacing new insights before anyone has to ask for them.
“We want to innovate in this industry, and with Solink’s help, we’re doing it,” said Hutto.
