Merlion Brewhouse Boat Quay (MCB-BQ) — Operations Control Review

Prepared by: Outlet Analyst, Merlion Brewhouse Boat Quay — for the Group CEO Reporting period: 29 June 2025 – 30 June 2026 (53 weeks of operations data)

A note on scope: the data behind this report covers voids, free-of-charge (FOC) items, discounts, and till items awaiting menu mapping — it does not include revenue, covers, or product-level sales. This is an operations-control and leakage review, not a profitability review. Every figure below is a rate, count, or SGD value drawn from that operations data; nothing here should be read as a statement about Boat Quay's total sales.

Executive Summary

• Boat Quay's void rate tripled to 2.90% in November 2025 (from a ~0.91% baseline over the prior four months) and stayed elevated at 1.37% in December before normalising — the single biggest one-month swing in Boat Quay's operating data, and it needs an explanation from the floor team.
• Boat Quay has more unmapped till sales than any of the other four outlets: SGD 14,991 across 566 till lines, all logged under five cryptic abbreviations (e.g. "PANDAN CREAM ALE PNT") that never match the menu. Every other outlet's total is lower, and the problem is still open as of 30 June 2026.
• Boat Quay is one of the most disciplined outlets on free giveaways: a 0.68% FOC rate, roughly half the 1.11% group average — this is a genuine strength worth protecting, not a cost problem.
• Katong is giving away SGD 56,198 in free items against Boat Quay's SGD 21,031 — nearly 3x more — driven almost entirely by one shift supervisor, Marcus Yeo (SGD 49,013, 9.11% personal FOC rate). This is not Boat Quay's problem, but at 3.38% average FOC (vs. Boat Quay's 0.68%) it is the single largest leak anywhere in the group and the CEO should ask Katong management about it directly.
• Group-wide discounting is dominated by one channel: "platform_promo" is SGD 125,082 of the SGD 163,280 total discount value (76.6%) across all five outlets — there is no per-outlet breakdown yet, so Boat Quay's exposure to this cost is currently invisible.

Findings

Finding 1 — The November 2025 void spike

What we found: Boat Quay's weekly void rate — the share of till lines rung and then cancelled — sat in a steady 0.66%–1.07% band from July through October 2025, averaging roughly 0.91% a month. In November 2025 it jumped to a monthly average of 2.90%, more than three times that baseline, before easing to 1.37% in December 2025 and returning to the normal ~0.8% range by January 2026. The single worst week landed on 2 November 2025, at 3.32%.

Looked at over the full 12 months from July 2025 (excluding the partial first week of data in late June 2025), Boat Quay's average void rate is 1.10% — the highest of all five outlets — ahead of Katong (0.96%), Jewel Changi (0.93%), Tanjong Pagar (0.92%) and Holland Village (0.90%), and above the group headline of 0.98%. The November spike alone is what pulls Boat Quay from mid-table into first place on this metric; strip it out and Boat Quay tracks close to its peers.

The rest of the group also saw void activity rise in November 2025 (group average void rate rose from ~0.92% in October to 1.36% in November), so part of this may be a group-wide event — a promotion, a menu change, or a till/POS issue that touched every outlet. Group-wide void-line reasons (which are not split by outlet) show November 2025 was the year's peak month for till-test voids (97 lines, versus a 13-month average of ~44) and the second-highest month for order-error voids (230 lines, behind December's 244). But Boat Quay's spike (3.2x its own baseline) was noticeably sharper than the group's (1.5x), which points to something specific to Boat Quay on top of any group-wide effect.

This chart shows Boat Quay's weekly void rate (red) against the group average (grey, dashed) for the 52 full weeks from July 2025. The November 2025 peak week is annotated.

What we would do: ask the Boat Quay GM what changed in the first two weeks of November 2025 — a new till/POS rollout, a staffing change, a promotion that produced order errors, or a training gap are the likely candidates given the reason mix. Confirm the rate is fully back to baseline (it has been since January 2026) and, if a cause is found, check whether it recurs seasonally around November.

Finding 2 — Unmapped till items: Boat Quay leads the group

What we found: across the group, five raw till button names at Boat Quay have never been matched to a menu item. That means SGD 14,991 of gross sales (566 till lines, 811 units) is currently invisible to any product-level report — it exists in the till but not in the menu system. This is the largest unmapped total of any of the five outlets: Tanjong Pagar is next at SGD 13,376, then Holland Village (SGD 7,903), Katong (SGD 3,469) and Jewel Changi (SGD 3,057).

The cause is visible in the raw item names themselves — all five are ALL-CAPS till abbreviations that don't match any menu entry:

Two things stand out beyond the SGD total. First, these are recognisable products — a pandan cream ale, barramundi tacos, a draft pint, a chilli prawn pizza — that other outlets likely sell under clean, mapped names; Boat Quay's till is just ringing them differently. Second, every one of these five items first appeared between 2 May and 5 June 2026 and was still being rung, unmapped, on the last day of data (30 June 2026) — this is a recent problem, not legacy noise, and it is still live.

This chart shows total unmapped gross amount (SGD) by outlet across the full data period, with Boat Quay highlighted as the largest.

What we would do: this is a quick fix — map these five till buttons to their correct menu items (a same-week task for whoever owns the POS menu config), and audit till naming conventions at Boat Quay so new items get created with the standard mapped name rather than a free-text abbreviation. Because these are brand-new items (first seen May–June 2026), this is also worth flagging to whichever outlets are launching similar new menu items now, so they don't repeat the same mistake.

Finding 3 — Free-of-charge giveaways: disciplined but after-6pm heavy

What we found: Boat Quay's free-of-charge (FOC) rate — the share of lines given away at no charge — averages 0.68% over the 12 months from July 2025 to June 2026, well below the 1.11% group headline rate and the second-lowest of all five outlets, essentially tied with Tanjong Pagar (0.68%). This is a genuine strength: the outlet is not leaking margin through free items the way some of its peers are.

Even so, over the 12-month period Boat Quay staff signed off 977 free lines worth SGD 21,031 in total. Looking at who signs these off and when, there is a clear split by role and shift rather than by individual: bar-side and evening staff give away the large majority of their free lines after 6pm — Jason Ng Kok Wai (bartender, 80.1% after 6pm, SGD 3,728 given away), Chloe Tan Wei Ling (bartender, 79.5%, SGD 3,680), Nurul Aisyah Rahman (shift supervisor, 78.7%, SGD 3,076) and Oliver Hughes (server, 74.4%, SGD 3,626) — while day-shift staff sit much lower: Farhan Ismail (server, 32.3% after 6pm), Priya Menon (server, 33.7%) and Ravi Kumaran (shift supervisor, 37.0%). No individual staff member's personal FOC rate is an outlier — all eight range narrowly between 0.65% and 0.71%, essentially matching the outlet average.

This chart shows the average FOC rate by outlet against the 1.11% group headline rate, with Boat Quay highlighted as one of the two lowest.

What we would do: no crackdown is warranted — Boat Quay's numbers don't justify one, and tightening controls here would fix a problem the outlet doesn't have. The one sensible, low-effort step is a light periodic check on after-6pm sign-offs (since that is where the bulk of the SGD 21,031 sits), simply to confirm the pattern continues to reflect legitimate service recovery and hospitality rather than drifting into an unmonitored habit.

Watchlist

• Katong's FOC rate is a group-level outlier worth the CEO's attention. Katong averages 3.38% FOC — roughly five times every other outlet and three times the 1.11% group headline — and gave away SGD 56,198 over the period, nearly three times Boat Quay's SGD 21,031. It is driven overwhelmingly by one person: shift supervisor Marcus Yeo, who personally signed off SGD 49,013 across 2,255 free lines (a 9.11% personal FOC rate, 84.0% of it after 6pm) — more than 25 times any other Katong staff member's giveaway value. This is not a Boat Quay issue, but it is the single largest leak anywhere in the group and should be looked into directly with Katong management.

  

  This chart shows total FOC value given away (SGD) by outlet, with Katong's outlier position and Boat Quay's much smaller total both visible.

• Group-wide discounting has no outlet breakdown yet. Across all five outlets combined, discount value totals SGD 163,280, of which "platform_promo" alone accounts for SGD 125,082 (76.6% of the total), followed by member10 (SGD 25,294), staff30 (SGD 6,716) and manager_goodwill (SGD 6,188). Because this data has no per-outlet split, Boat Quay's own exposure to platform-promo discounting is currently unknown — request an outlet-level cut of this data next run so Boat Quay's real discount cost can be quantified.

• Till-test voids track closely with Boat Quay's November spike, but can't be confirmed as the cause. Group-wide, till-test void lines totalled 571 over the year and peaked in November 2025 at 97 lines (versus a ~44-line monthly average) — the same month Boat Quay's void rate tripled. Because chart data on void reasons has no outlet split, this cannot be confirmed as Boat Quay-specific; flag it as a lead for whoever investigates the November spike, and request an outlet-level reason breakdown next run.

Data sources: Merlion Group Operations Control dashboard (voids, FOC, discounts, unmapped items), 8 extracted data tables, all complete with no truncation. Full query trail in analysis/analysis.sql.