How one large restaurateur and one small toy company tackled critical strategic needs with the right data infrastructure. In a rapidly moving digit
How one large restaurateur and one small toy company tackled critical strategic needs with the right data infrastructure.
In a rapidly moving digital world, every enterprise is a data enterprise, whether they know it or not. Putting that data to work in service of complex business problems requires a platform capable of integrating data from multiple sources and delivering it where needed, with modern data analytics. Those solutions, increasingly, are found in the cloud.
According to global market intelligence firm IDC, worldwide spending on public cloud services rose 26% year over year in 2019 to over $233 billion.1 By 2022, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs.2
The highly competitive world of restaurants is no exception. More than just making good food, it’s an incredible web of internal influences like stocking and inventory, staffing, commodities pricing, and customer survey data mixed with external forces like weather, holidays, and even cultural and sporting events—all capable of impacting demand forecasts and all of which must be managed on a daily basis.
“How do we do that? By the data we keep,” says Mark Abramson, lead architect of BI and analytics at Brinker International, Inc.
Brinker International operates over 1,600 Chili’s® Grill & Bar and Maggiano’s Little Italy® restaurants across 29 countries and two territories. Its legacy, on-premises infrastructure held 15 years’ worth of analytics and reporting, with outdated data clogging the pipes and limiting the potential positive impact of new metrics and better KPIs. “We had a lot of data sitting around,” Abramson says.
Similarly, Intertoys, a small European toy retailer based in Amsterdam, faced its own challenges around data, particularly with fragmentation. Sales were generated in multiple retail channels, often crossing national borders, each with its own legacy systems. “It was difficult to integrate all of that data into one organized structure,” says IT manager Robin Tichler.
Two companies of different sizes and industries required significant improvements in data architecture to provide the speed, accessibility, and flexibility demanded by competitive markets. Reflecting those larger trends, both looked to the cloud.
Both Brinker International and Intertoys considered multiple cloud-only solutions that were incapable of multi-dimensional scale. Intertoys considered multiple cloud solutions, with Teradata earning prime shelf position. Both companies turned to Teradata for hybrid multi-cloud solutions, with Brinker selecting Teradata Vantage™ on AWS and Intertoys opting for Teradata Vantage™ on Azure.
Creating visibility
The advantages of the cloud in promoting agility and visibility were appealing to Intertoys. “Public cloud is cheaper and has become more secure,” Tichler explains. “Teradata Vantage on Azure can easily upscale and downscale—and is available 24 hours a day.”
Constructing that network, however, was not something the toy company could handle itself. “Technologies growing that fast are too difficult to manage,” he says. “We needed to outsource that capability.”
Intertoys, to that point managing its own data center, found a partner in Teradata. Vantage unifies data lakes, data warehouses, and analytics into a single platform. “We were able to scale what we needed, especially calculations, because we had more power to run them,” Tichler says. “There are no issues with finding data. We’ve gained reliable, predictable running times for queries.”
The newly nimble company gained insight into changing consumer habits during the pandemic, and the agility to respond. “There was a need for different products like games, puzzles, and construction items—learnings gained not from ‘feelings’ but from direct figures on a country level,” Tichler explains. Meanwhile, operational improvements in digital infrastructure helped Intertoys manage a growth in sales, take advantage of decreasing rental costs, and open 10 new stores. “It’s a fantastic result, just before the busy time of year.”
The right fit
Teradata Vantage was an excellent fit for Brinker International as well, at a time when high-quality, responsive data has never been more valuable. The global pandemic forced the casual dining giant to quickly navigate new and difficult questions around restaurant capacity, ordering behaviors, and more, with incredible variance across markets and nations.
“In any situation, you want reports in the hands of the business to make actionable decisions, but it’s been even more important during this time period,” Abramson says. “If you looked at our dashboard, it was tenfold different than before world events.”
Every day, Brinker International runs 500,000 1- to 3-second queries and processes terabytes of data to prepare its restaurants for opening. Particularly in light of a wholly new, COVID-19 reality, with increased to-go and delivery orders and reshaped labor and food needs, adeptly shifting with the marketplace was critical.
“We would not have been able to react as quickly to the immediate changes needed to survive if we were in our old analytics and reporting environment,” Abramson says. “We didn’t have to worry about that one big thing at a very tenuous time.”
For large organizations like Brinker International, meeting strategic goals means focusing on data, not workload management. For small companies like Intertoys, it translates to visibility and access into data without excess budgetary outlays. For both, success relies on the ability to scale capabilities up and down based on demand and moving data effectively to answer relevant business questions, fast. That, Abramson says, is a make-or-break proposition.
“We deal in food and guests. So you wouldn’t necessarily think we’re highly technological,” he says, “but, in fact, we are.”
Fonte: www.wsj.com
