Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that fast-food giant Jollibee Foods Corporation, one of the world’s largest food companies with 17 brands and over 5,800 outlets in 34 countries, has selected AWS as its cloud provider for its digital transformation globally.
Jollibee is migrating its IT infrastructure from its data centers in the Philippines, parts of Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and North America to AWS.
The migration is expected to make Jollibee more agile, enabling the company to respond to changes in consumer behavior more quickly, like those brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic which drove a significant rise in delivery orders.
To accelerate the move to cloud, Jollibee’s global headquarters in the Philippines is leading the charge in the migration to AWS.
The company worked with a local AWS partner, DXC Technology, to decommission its on-premises data centers and migrate its SAP workloads to AWS in less than 24 hours.
So far, the company said the migration has helped the group reduce costs, streamline IT management, and innovate new services.
Jollibee said its digital transformation was triggered by the need to better understand the evolving dining requirements of its customers in the last 18 months. It cited social distancing restrictions, lockdowns, and limits on in-person dining made food demand difficult to predict as customers’ dining habits changed.
Jollibee’s operations in the Philippines used Amazon DynamoDB, a flexible NoSQL database service for high-performance applications at any scale, to help tag, monitor, and create sales reports.
Using Amazon Athena, an interactive query service, the company automated the creation of operational dashboards based on sales reports to provide real-time restaurant insights on best-selling menu items, ordering and combination preferences, results of sales promotions, and restaurant revenues.
The insights enabled Jollibee to stock inventory and allocate staff more efficiently. It was also able to remotely monitor and analyze food inventory across the company’s manufacturing facilities, commissaries, and distribution centers throughout the Philippines, better scale production based on spikes in demand (during national holidays), and more efficiently dispatch food to its restaurant network nationwide.
“AWS has helped us transform our operations in the cloud, allowing us to act quickly as dining habits continue to evolve,” said Yoly Chua, head of business technology for the Philippines and EMEA of the Jollibee Group.
“Advanced AWS capabilities, like analytics, are a key enabler for us to become a data-driven organization that can innovate across all areas of the business, from supply chain operations to point-of-sale. The cloud helps to ensure our customer experience is excellent in both the restaurants and at drive-thru eateries.”
Conor McNamara, managing director for Asean at AWS, said Jollibee forged a new data-driven path with its decision to hop entirely onto the cloud.
“We look forward to helping the Jollibee Group’s brands leverage AWS’s unmatched portfolio of cloud capabilities to weather this storm and emerge stronger with new and innovative offerings that delight customers,” McNamara said.
