Microsoft helps Shakey’s scale up pizza delivery
SHAKEY’S PIZZA chain has partnered with tech giant Microsoft to streamline business operations and facilitate its growing online delivery system.
The pizza company was prompted to scale up its resources after officials realized that its current system was unable to support demand during peak times, Mauricio D. Franco, Jr., chief information officer of Shakey’s Philippines, said.
Since there was an emphasis on its delivery service — which make up 30% to 35% of the business — “we came to a realization that our system cannot support the demand during peak times,” Mr. Franco said during the project’s press launch on Tuesday in Bonifacio Global City.
Under the partnership, Microsoft Dynamics AX, which will run on Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure, will be used to optimize the store’s accounting, procurement, inventory, and store operations through analytics and data management.
As a result, Shakey’s hopes to enjoy seamless integration in every customer interaction.
The company serves an average of 100 guests in less than 200 stores nationwide. Besides in- house guests, the company also takes orders made online and through voicemail which comprise 15% and 85% of total deliveries, respectively.
Delivery orders hit peaks during special days like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, with transactions reaching seven times more those incurred during regular days.
“We have to scale up our resources, that is why we’re using Microsoft Azure as our infrastructure to support our delivery system,” said Mr. Franco.
USE OF BITCOIN FOR TRANSACTIONS
Meanwhile, as the food company ventures into the use of technology to streamline operations, Mr. Franco also discussed the planned use of bitcoins as a mode of payment when ordering from Shakey’s.
“We see the application of Bitcoin has been successful in the international market, we see it going viral in the global market, so we are preparing for this because we know that this is something our guests would like,” Mr. Franco said.
Bitcoin is an online currency recognized globally for conducting payments through the Internet.
“We are actually testing it with a certain provider... we can see this happening within the next three months,” he added.
20 NEW BRANCHES NATIONWIDE
The year 2017 will also see the opening of 20 new Shakey’s locations in the country, half of which will be in Metro Manila with the other half distributed throughout Visayas and Mindanao.
“We closed last year with 184, this year we’re planning on at least 20 additional stores. We opened already five,” Shakey’s general manager Jorge Q. Concepcion said.
Investments in each store location would vary, depending on its size and whether the branch would be placed inside a mall or establish its own building.
“Typically more or less P10 million for a store located inside a mall... if we decide to build from the ground up that would take around P20 to P30 million,” Mr. Concepcion said.