Little Caesars' Seamless Solutions Integration
In 2017, Little Caesars Pizza began testing a number of new technologies to make buying and eating pizza quicker and easier. In support of a more convenient customer experience, they worked to implement a Reserve-N-Ready strategy.
The new strategy included a custom POS system, a mobile ordering application and an industry-first, self-service mobile order pick-up station, better known as the Pizza Portal. In addition, Little Caesars also looked to improve the back-of-the-house operations with an IoT device aimed at increasingbusiness efficiency.
Deploying these new technologies consistently across the franchise network posed several challenges to the corporate IT team that had limited support resources for the franchise owners.
“Partnering with NuArx enabled us to get deployed faster, secured our environment and offloaded key franchisee support activities all within a cost-share model with our operators,” said Lance Shinabarger, VP Global Infrastructure & Architecture at Little Caesars.
Challenges
• An inconsistent network infrastructure across franchise locations forced a network redesign project at each site which slowed down roll-out of the POS system in particular, a key tool-set of the overall restaurant strategy.
• Budget restrictions limited the resources from the corporate IT staff for individual site implementation and support.
• Lack of technical resources at the store level slowed implementation for a system designed to actually make operating a store more efficient.
• An inconsistent change management process allowed for too much variability and not enough control or visibility from the corporate IT team.
How NuArx Helped
• A custom hardware and service solution was deployed and implemented efficiently via the NuArx certified engineering staff, ultimately achieving a pace of 100 sites per month.
• Utilizing proprietary blueprinting and change management process, NuArx was able to work with corporate IT staff to design a common, secure infrastructure that ensured configuration control was defined from corporate. This readied franchisees for a smoother roll-out of new technologies while at the same time securing the network from costly data breaches. A 2-for-1 return on investment.
• The Pizza Portal roll-out was able to achieve a 50% improvement in deployment effort.
• 96% of Little Caesars locations have implemented a secure network configuration and are protected by a data breach security policy.
• Franchisees were given personalized support throughout the installation process and continue to enjoy on-going 24/7/365 first-level technical support.
• Utilizing an owner-funded model for infrastructure standardization allowed corporate IT to allocate their budget to more innovative objectives aimed at differentiating the brand.