Region: North America

Sector: Restaurants

Client Challenges: The business wanted to update its customer interactions and experiences with digital transformation initiatives

Results:

• More than 20,000 stores enabled with Mobile Order & Pay
• 99.8% 24-hour uptime
• Over one million transactions successfully handled on a daily basis
• Cost reduction through successful transfer of resources to Capgemini across nine countries
• Vendor consolidation with end-to-end services being provided by a single IT support body

The Client

This major American fast food chain serves over 69 million customers daily across over 100 countries at more than 37,000 outlets. In terms of revenue, it is considered to be one of the world’s largest restaurant chains.

This success largely stems from the utilization of a franchisee-based business model. The client is a global brand, but the vast majority of its restaurants are owned and operated by independent entrepreneurs.

However, in today’s market, growing digital disruptions are causing major restaurant industry companies to rethink how they operate in order to retain and grow their market share. The client was no exception and wanted to invest in its digital capabilities to offer customers intuitive, improved digital experiences. So, in August 2017, the organization sought out Capgemini as a global IT strategic partner due to its digital capabilities and restaurant industry experience.

The Challenge

The client wanted to keep its customers at the center of its business. This required new technology that would improve customer experience whether they were eating in, taking out, going through the drive-through, or ordering delivery. The key to accomplishing this was constructing an efficient IT architecture that supported the company’s ability to easily deploy new features and functionalities with faster time to market, all without increasing costs or sacrificing quality or reliability.

The Solution and Benefits

In order to reshape customer interactions and experiences, Capgemini constructed an efficient IT architecture that supported the ability to easily deploy new features and functionalities with ADMnext – a comprehensive portfolio of ADM assets and services aimed at delivering uninterrupted value and excellence. Overall, Capgemini delivered:

• More than 20,000 stores enabled with Mobile Order & Pay
• 99.8% 24-hour uptime
• Over one million transactions successfully handled on a daily basis
• Cost reduction through successful transfer of resources to Capgemini across nine countries
• Vendor consolidation with end-to-end services being provided by a single IT support body.

The overall strategy that Capgemini’s ADMnext employed was one of Transformational Leadership – fostering a culture of change, aligning teams to common goals, and driving accountability. The foundation of this strategy was a perfected and innovative DevOps model, leveraging ADMnext’s cutting-edge tools and concepts to deliver a comprehensive digital stack.

Capgemini began by collaborating with development partners to leverage new techniques and technologies like Agile/ DevOps and AI/ML/Automation to improve the predictability and profitability of the delivery and address major issues such as:

• Extremely complex design
• Ramping up high-competency staff on ambitious timelines
• Moving to a completely agile mindset
• Introducing a transformed platform without disrupting business operations.

In 2017, Capgemini formed a single, collaborative team with the client, following its One Team approach to manage an end-to-end IT service delivery. Overall, Capgemini delivered the development, deployment, and maintenance of digital, e-commerce, and restaurant technology solutions. This enabled the client to put the customer at the heart of its business through the introduction of services like kiosk ordering, mobile ordering and payment, and home delivery.

Capgemini’s transition with the client began one of the world’s largest digital transformations in the retail quick-service restaurant space to date. This was based on a team with expertise in DevOps, AWS, quality, and monitoring & logging technologies. Capgemini cross-skilled and re-skilled app developers, quality engineers, and infra engineers through a six-week, hands-on training program with SL support. The partners also hired AWS, DevOps, and quality engineers for strategic roles, which helped to elevate the skill levels of the existing team.

A comprehensive CI-CD Model

Built on containers and Infrastructure-as-a-Code principles, Capgemini’s comprehensive CI-CD model reduced cloud environment replication time by 60% in comparison to traditional DevOps models. Capgemini implemented an end-to-end, integrated toolchain for automated code quality checks, security scans, and functionality and reliability testing.

New, agile-based ways of working

Together with the client, Capgemini created structured teams to accommodate fast-moving changes and innovations. These included the architecture team, engineering team, capability specific DevOps teams, and development teams embedded with quality engineers. These teams practiced custom agile ways of working and collaborated seamlessly as One Team across four global development centers.

Proactive, quality engineering principles

By working with Capgemini, the client was able to implement quality engineering principles, which resulted in approximately 85% automation coverage. The partners also leveraged subject-matter experts, data configurations, devices, and labs for proactive, early market testing of over 300 virtualized services.

In improving overall operations, Capgemini delivered datadriven and proactive monitoring, leveraging different sets of toolchains that specifically addressed the individual needs of developers and operation teams. Overall, Capgemini delivered huge benefits in productivity, delivery, and risk reduction.

Productivity gains included:

• Improved development and deployment cycle – Approximately 35 releases per year
• Early performance baselining and automated and early market testing for proactive detection of almost 80% of issues prior to Market QA
• Auto-healing and auto-scaling – Over 99.5% Application availability
• Reduced project delivery timelines – One year down to five-six months
• Proactive production issue identification and resolution
• Re-allocation of maintenance and support to new functionalities.

Delivery gains included:

• Accelerated Time-to-Delivery – Releases increased from eight to 35 yearly and Time to Market went from 36 weeks to six
• Markedly improved software quality, operational support, and faster fixes
• Optimized cost-of-delivery and reduced cost of ownership – Mean Time to Repair went from five days to less than eight hours
• Drastically improved promotion and offer effectiveness • Incorporated proactive processes and data-driven decision making
• Consistent user experience across Geographies.

Risk reduction gains included:

• Drastic reduction in Application downtime, and total Design and Testing time
• The ability to deploy without bringing the whole platform down
• Improved platform scalability (Cloud hosting), security, and access compliance.

The Road Ahead with ADMnext

Throughout this engagement, Capgemini was able to deliver quantifiable benefits to its client, and the partners intend to continue their collaboration in order to build upon this success. Future innovation initiatives are likely to focus on specific challenges and problem areas, which will evolve as the engagement progresses.