"The work Blueprint is doing will allow us to fully leverage our data to make business decisions. This is the clearest view we've ever had of a successful path forward; I'll finally be able to take a vacation."
The problem
Data should be at the heart of any business decision, no matter the industry, but access to timely, accurate data is especially critical in the QSR space. The executive, finance and marketing teams need access to real-time information on top-selling menu items in different regions, across different channels and throughout different dayparts to react in real time to ever-changing customer preferences. The CFO needs high-quality sales data as input and success criteria for critical forecasts and projections. But for any QSR to accomplish these goals, all its systems must work together to provide timely, accurate data.
Over the years, this QSR invested heavily into building new systems, services and data warehouses to support its digital expansion and growth goals. While this created a rich technology environment, it also siloed data across 36 competing systems. Differing business rules and logic caused reports to display inconsistent data on different schedules for different audiences. Days spent validating and manually copying data from one system to produce critical reports resulted in employees losing trust in the data and making decisions for promotions and customer loyalty programs based on intuition rather than information.
The Blueprint Way
With the help of a Course of Action Assessment, the strategy for a simplified data architecture capable of accurate, near real-time reporting and a roadmap to reach the QSR’s desired cloud-based future state was constructed, keeping the organization’s goal of being an industry leader in customer loyalty in mind.
The roadmap included recommendations on which legacy systems to retire and how best to consolidate its BI systems to facilitate critical, timely data access. This roadmap also became the guide to building a modernized data platform that consolidates and connects all the company’s data into a single, accurate source of truth.
The Blueprint team identified high-profile, quick-to-value scenarios, leveraged our organizational change management division to engage and ready stakeholders, and worked side by side with the organization’s data governance group to ensure data quality across each project. Lastly, Blueprint worked extensively with our client’s cloud provider, Google Cloud Platform, and its other technology partners to improve existing systems and optimize them for the future state.
A key part of the data platform includes our data virtualization accelerator that allows organizations to provide secure links to data feeds, API endpoints to data, including metadata and orchestration, and connectors for utilities such as Power BI, Tableau, Looker and Excel. Leveraging Conduit allows organizations to access quality data faster and remove a significant cost to building and maintaining their data estate.
With access to real-time customer data that now computes within five minutes, instead of the 240 minutes it took with their legacy data estate, the QSR chain can now promote personalized offers, menu items, give rewards, and offer contests and challenges at business speed – all while customers are still in the store. This drives frequent customer visits and higher spending per order and has allowed the chain to truly become a leader in customer loyalty in the QSR industry.
The organization also saved millions of dollars on labor costs, as executives, financial analysts and IT technicians now don’t need to spend hours manually assessing costs and operations due to the modernized data estate and functional visual dashboards and reports.
“The work Blueprint is doing will allow us to fully leverage our data to make business decisions,” one executive said. “This is the clearest view we’ve ever had of a successful path forward; I’ll finally be able to take a vacation.”
