Order-to-cash for a large distributed nationwide restaurant operations

Most businesses of any size and across industries have one business process that is of paramount importance - Order to cash and inventory management. Managing revenue receipts and controlling COGS (Cost of goods sold) including the cost of human resources, are the two variables that drive the gross profit of a business. It is a classic problem and the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems of the world have been used to solve this problem to make businesses more profitable. This problem applies to most verticals- retail, restaurant, hospitality services, manufacturing, and e-commerce.

Background

Good old Order-to-Cash and inventory management is getting interesting because of the changes in the business models and adoption of specialized cloud and SaaS systems - all geared towards making the bottom lines even better. E-commerce, globalization, and consolidations are moving away from large monolith ERPs to specialized SaaS systems make order-to-cash problems, a problem of scale and distribution. Key drivers are:

• Defragmentation of ERP and adoption of SaaS systems
• On-premise systems working with the cloud and SaaS platforms
• Newer business models, e-commerce, and expansion of large chains

Challenge

One of our hospitality customers with more than 45 locations nationwide and almost 35,000 daily guests was having this triggered by its rapid growth. This customer followed a Hybrid Cloud Strategy with applications running on the cloud as well as SaaS offerings from various vendors and on-premise at the point of sales. Providing a high-touch consistent guest experience was of utmost importance to the business that directly affected its bottom line. The growing pains associated with expansion and growth required well orchestrated business processes. Much like other businesses in retail or hospitality, it had large event sales managed by Salesforce on the cloud, a SaaS inventory application, HR & payroll which was a SaaS platform, and an analytics and reporting platform on the cloud managing order to cash. These cloud based SaaS applications would talk to the POS and on-premise systems at each of the location as part of the process flow.

• Large event orders, items and deposits would flow to the POS at each location
• Inventory updates based on actual order at the time of sale
• Sales receipt to finance systems for reconciliation and reporting
• Time worked for staff at each location to Payroll

Solution

RoboMQ solved challenges of cloud and on-premise application integration using its Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP). RoboMQ Hybrid Integration Platform allows integration of on-premise apps to SaaS applications over its distributed service mesh that offers guaranteed delivery of value bearing transactions with near real time process execution.

With truly distributed Hybrid Integration Platform, data flow, and business functionality can be applied on-premise as well on cloud to best optimize processing steps to achieve desired business outcome. This architecture allowed our customer to achieve:

• Near real-time update of order, item details and deposits before the guests showed up at location
• Inventory updates in near real-time
• Collection of time worked for workers across 45+ locations for timely payroll processing
• Apply business functions locally or on the cloud as needed, avoiding unnecessary round trip and effective information security and control
• Guaranteed delivery and data integrity of business critical information

With this implementation of distributed order-to-cash, RoboMQ allowed this large restaurant and entertainment chain to put critical revenue processes in place to help it double its footprint in less than 2 years.
 

Want to know more about this solution?