As with any service industry, those in food services and facilities management must leverage vast amounts of operational data to deliver an exceptional customer experience to succeed.
These stakes were high for a global leader serving over 100 million people daily across 55 countries. With a workforce exceeding half a million, this industry giant prides itself on promoting health, sustainability, and excellence in every facet of its operations. To keep up with its mission, the client had to manage operational and customer data across 1,900 applications, a formidable task with a fragmented and siloed data landscape.
Operational friction impacted customer service
The client struggled with stockouts and overstock situations due to inconsistent data sources, which was fast becoming a resource drain. This operational friction led to critical service delays and discrepancies in menu planning and nutritional information, further hindering the client’s ability to provide consistent and reliable service to global patrons.
Manually processing operational data spread across geographies and customers was labor-intensive, and the client struggled to keep up with the growing complexity of its operations.
The client also could not make strategic decisions based on customer feedback and other operational cues because of slow and costly data consolidation methods. This left issues unaddressed for longer than customers could wait, further diminishing customer experience.
The client’s inability to adapt quickly to customer needs and market dynamics would have impacted its competitive edge in a fast-paced industry. Realizing the need to fix gaps in its data management processes, the client turned to Persistent to help streamline the data-to-insights journey.
From chaos to clarity with Persistent’s data expertise
Persistent and the client embarked on a comprehensive data modernization project to consistently capture and interpret data across applications. We established standardized data models to consolidate and analyze cues from operational data and signals from customer feedback to identify areas of intervention and opportunity. This helped the client plan better, anticipate and meet customer demands more accurately, and ensure a consistent high service level across touchpoints.
To support business expansion decisions, we created a GenAI-guided work estimator tool that accurately forecasts costs and efforts for new workloads, helping estimate financial and operational costs.
A streamlined and reliable data factory or data hub, created to process large-scale data and managed by Persistent’s data scientists, supported this analysis. This data factory ensured the client had real-time access to cleaned, parsed, and accurate data from which to draw insights. Our in-house accelerator, iAURA, automated data ingestion, reconciliation, migration, and monitored data freshness to reduce manual efforts while simplifying data availability and reliability.
To further streamline operations with data from the client’s application portfolio, Persistent leveraged custom accelerators to create bespoke data modeling solutions. These solutions sourced and exposed data between applications and internal systems via secure APIs, fast-tracked with analysis through virtualization, and automated recurring processes to reduce manual load further.
Streamlined data ecosystem triggers competitive agility
By unifying data into four regional and one global hubs, the client now had a single, trusted source of information across the enterprise, making data monetization faster and simpler. Automation and repeatable processes led to a 35% decrease in costs and processing time, allowing the client to enhance the speed and quality of its decisions. Equipped with efficient data operations and AI-driven estimation tools, the client has brought agility to its operations and can respond more quickly to market demands and operational challenges. The streamlined and intelligent data ecosystem enabled the client to maintain its competitive edge in the fast-changing food services and facilities management market.
