Qcompany

Kentucky Fried Chicken (part of Yum! Brands) is a global franchise organization with nearly 22,200 restaurants in 135 countries. The Netherlands currently has 62 restaurants that are run on a franchise basis. KFC wants to scale up and will soon open four new restaurants in the Netherlands, but to grow successfully it takes more than just new premises. 

 

Insight into customer behavior is an important factor! Every year, 13 million receipts roll out of the cash register at KFC Nederland. Data that KFC does little or nothing with and that needs to change. At the end of 2017, KFC enlisted the help of Retailscience to convert this source of data into relevant information. This resulted in a platform of internal (PoS, CRM systems and logistics systems) and external data (weather, passer-by information, online reviews and social media messages) that quickly provides insights into issues such as customer behavior and customer experiences..

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Systems run up against limits

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The franchisees in the Netherlands, Sweden, Iceland and Belgium are supported by the restaurant support center, located in Amsterdam. The support team uses Excel and Access to store and edit data, but the company ran into limits with this software. Systems get stuck due to the amount of data that is retrieved from Point of Sale systems and also offers little structure. That is why Van Nimwegen  (Manager Planning & Control KFC Nederland) went in search of an analysis platform that could help them structurally in the coming years in the field of analysis. The platform should provide insight into the latest trends and changes related to customer behaviour. 

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For example, you want to know how actions are running and whether adjustments are necessary,

what the trends are in sales and how certain products are doing.

You need good analytics for that.'

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FROM NIMWAYS

MANAGER PLANNING & CONTROL KFC NETHERLANDS 

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Better respond to trends

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The search ended with RetailScience, which offers a cloud solution that integrates with any type of Point of Sale system. The platform is based on Oracle Analytics Cloud. RetailScience was chosen because, like KFC, they are a hands-on organization and offer a cloud platform that offers the flexibility that KFC needs. Developments in the restaurant industry are rapid. For example, KFC has introduced an order kiosk and delivery has been added. You want to easily include these innovations in your analyzes in order to be as flexible as possible.

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Autonomous Data

An important part of the solution that KFC purchases from RetailScience is Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, which is deployed alongside Oracle Analytics Cloud. This platform is self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing. The concept eliminates the need for human intervention to provision, secure, back up, monitor or restore systems. Computer and storage capacity is fully elastic and as an organization you only pay for actual consumption. The platform keeps itself up-to-date with the latest security updates and patches, encrypts all data, intercepts data breaches through preventive control mechanisms and automatically protects systems against malicious attacks from the outside and from within. And administrator errors are automatically fixed, resulting in 99.995 percent availability or 2.5 minutes of downtime per month, including scheduled maintenance.

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Internal and external data

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KFC has been using the RetailScience platform since the summer of 2018. The support team now has much more time for the analyzes and less IT knowledge is required in-house. RetailScience retrieves the data from the PoS systems, develops the dashboards that provide insight into the most important trends and, if necessary, offers KFC the help of its own data scientists.

In addition to internal sources such as PoS data on visitor numbers and turnover, RetailScience can also include external data in analyses, such as holiday periods, sentiment about KFC in social media or weather forecasts. RetailScience also uses machine learning to predict the number of customers and future revenue as accurately as possible. With these forecasts, KFC can, for example, optimize staff planning, and also combat waste, which can be a significant cost item for a fast food retailer.

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From hours to minutes

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A concrete example of the use of the new analytics platform is the launch of a new product group in the restaurants; popcorn for one euro.

 

 

'You want to know as soon as possible after the launch: does it work or not?

Need more promotion? Maybe we need to adjust the visuals?

Does the new product run faster in the restaurant or at the kiosk outside?

Or can we perhaps discover regional differences?

We can now answer all those questions very quickly.'

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FROM NIMWAYS

MANAGER PLANNING & CONTROL KFC NETHERLANDS 

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To do this, the support team uploads all PoS data to RetailScience once a day and KFC can immediately start the analysis. Compared to Excel and Access, this is a difference from hours to minutes, not to mention the fact that KFC was previously unable to produce daily reports. Theoretically, KFC can even make real-time analyses, but unfortunately the existing PoS system does not allow that at the moment and they can only extract data once a day.

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Forecasting is possible

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The Van Nimwegen team now uses the platform to produce daily and weekly reports that play an important role in the consultation with the franchisees. Thanks to the RetailScience platform, KFC can better identify trends and respond more quickly to changes in customer behavior. Forecasting is also better possible because they can see more quickly whether a certain trend is relevant throughout the organization or only for a specific franchise. The analyzes also provide good starting points for actions (for example with a well-functioning product) and the analyzes help to prevent waste. KFC can now accurately determine what they will sell.

 

Ease of use

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For the support center itself, the new analytics platform has not only provided much better analyzes and time savings, but also a lot of ease of use. There are extensive possibilities to create analyzes and dashboards and you are ready with a few clicks. In addition, all data in the platform remains available for analysis and that scalability also means that a new branch can connect in a short time.

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