JUNE, 20238 IN MYV EWWIN-WIN-WIN, THE IMPORTANCE OF COLLABORATIVE PROCUREMENT TO SUPPORT THE DIGITAL METAMORPHOSISA major global restaurant brand achieved record-breaking industry development, opened over 3,000 net-new units in 110 countries, beating their industry record set in 2021. At the same time, they reached a new high of $24 billion in digital sales ­ doubling their digital business since 2019... this focus on digital occurring while managing through a pandemic is not a transformation, it's a metamorphosis.Every year the pace of technology innovation has been increasing and the evolution of the restaurant industry through COVID is an interesting case study. My cousin owns a small Mom and Pop, Dulin's Café, located in Vancouver, Washington. Looking back at his experience highlights the industry challenges... "In the earliest days of COVID, the government forced restaurants to close. Then when we could open, our customers could not come into our lobby to eat. I have no room to build a drive thru and had no website to speak of so I had to create a website and then offer carry out and delivery through delivery services. My kitchen was set up to do walk in traffic so when the volume of orders were too much for us to handle we just had to stop answering the phone". Now imagine that challenge at global scale. Chance of that magnitude requires a deep understanding of the new customer needs and the options to meet those needs as well as the effective execution of the digital metamorphosis. The sudden inability to serve customers created new requirements. First and foremost, how does a restaurant engage with a customer who cannot come into the store to order? Many restaurant concepts rely on carry out, delivery or drive-thru, however in my cousin's case, he did not. He had to immediately implement new customer engagement channels including a website, carry out and "call center" if you could call it that simply to take orders from his customers. Additionally, he added a pick-up awning and made his menu available through delivery aggregators so that he could get the food to his customers. He did not want to take on his own delivery fleet so the aggregator websites offered both another ordering channel and an ability to deliver food to customers.Labor also became an issue across the industry. My cousin was fortunate enough to have long term staff and focused heavily on keeping them employed while in other concepts, labor became a challenge. The labor shortage that impacted the country forced the industry to look at options to replace labor with automation. My local Walmart is a great example. They changed from a handful of checkout lines to almost 90 percent self-checkout and a guest service member.As the changes in behavior drove new requirements to meet customer and employee needs, the requirements placed on CIOs and IT departments increased while the ability to work from home exacerbated a technology talent shortage. CIOs had to balance the competing needs of multiple stakeholders to define and execute the most critical priorities. The good news is that the speed of technological advancement and the ability to expand new concepts using cloud infrastructure and readily available capital created a vortex of new technology companies. Another interesting consequence of this BY ERIC DULIN, DIRECTOR OF PROCUREMENT, DIGITAL & TECHNOLOGY, YUM! BRANDSEric Dulin
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