SAP partner Lagom helps Restaurant Brands streamline operations on SAP Cloud

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Auckland-headquartered SAP partner Lagom has helped ASX and NZX-listed corporate food franchisee Restaurant Brands to consolidate its operations with multiple SAP solutions.

Lagom assisted Restaurant Brands in the implementation of SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition across its operations in Australia, New Zealand, as well as Hawaii and California in the US.

Under Lagom’s management, the SAP implementation took 10 months, and other solutions deployed included SAP EnableNow, SAP Concur, and SAP Business Transformation Platform (BTP).

The SAP partner helped Restaurant Brands with product selection and the implementation of a single, consistent ERP system, as previously the organisation operated a number of different ERP systems.

Its original systems required manual intervention and meant that generating consolidated reports was often difficult and inefficient.

Restaurant Brands wanted to consolidate its systems due to recent rapid growth, primarily the result of recent acquisitions of Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen in 2017 and Firehouse Subs in 2021, which meant the franchisee surpassed NZ$1.2 billion revenue in 2022.

Restaurant Brands also operates KFC stores in Australia, New Zealand and California, as well as some Taco Bell stores, Pizza Hut stores and Carl’s Jr. stores.

Since going live with the SAP implementation in April 2022, Restaurant Brands said they are seeing “significant business benefits,” whereby increased automation has led to faster payment runs, month-end processes and consolidated reports, providing information for faster decision making.

The company also said the new automated system has improved supply chain integration issues, with teams now able to successfully manage supply and demand planning and anticipate any future global supply chain disruptions.

Restaurant Brands stated that over 100 thousand orders have been placed and processed via the new SAP system.

Lagom will continue to work for Restaurant Brands as its application management and centre of excellence partner.

“The focus on doing the right things at the right time, while utilising the RISE with SAP approach, resulted in a successful implementation across New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii and California in the space of 10 months," Lagom general manager of delivery Paul Tombleson closely oversaw the project and said.

“The difference this initiative has made to the business is substantial and Lagom is really proud of being the partner that helped to enable this remarkable journey for Restaurant Brands.”

“Lagom was definitely the right fit for our organisation. We’re a fairly lean and flat organisation, so we needed a partner who was agile and had a lot of experience," Restaurant Brands group systems accountant and product owner Thuy Le-Kim commented.

We relied on and valued their expertise and their flexibility to adapt throughout the process," Le-Kim said.

“We wanted a system that would be able to grow and evolve with the business. We now have consistent, robust processes that mean we can increase in size without needing to dramatically increase the number of people we need to run the business,” Le-Kim said.

“Our approach was unusual, we didn’t start with a current state analysis, because each region was operating differently."

"Instead, we started by looking at SAP Best Practice to see if it was right for our needs – if it would deliver the key outcomes we needed.”

“There were definitely some things that we changed, but there was a lot of rigor around the decision-making to ensure the organisation could maintain changes on an ongoing basis."

"Significant work was done to ensure that there was minimal variation from standards, the result was a system that works effectively with a reduced cost of ownership over its lifetime,” Le-Kim concluded.

SAP ANZ head of midmarket Sofiane Ainine said that implementing cloud solutions was a key factor in Restaurant Brands being able to simplify its processes to achieve its business goals.

“Implementing SAP cloud solutions, including SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition, shows the value our RISE with SAP approach is delivering for customers,” Ainine said.

“The ability to consolidate, streamline and standardise operations across multiple geographies is enabling Restaurant Brands to adapt to change faster and free up more resource across the organisation to focus on opportunities for growth,” she concluded.