Global Multi-Brand Food Restaurant Modernizes its ERP

The Client

A multi-brand restaurant company operates three major quick-service restaurant (QSR) brands across 150+ countries around the world. They partnered with Smartbridge to modernize their international Oracle JD Edwards ERP system through system upgrades, and replace PeopleSoft with JD Edwards 9.2 to support all US operations.

The Problem

With the advent of digital transformation, the QSR food retail industry is undergoing significant changes over the past few years. Companies are modernizing their applications by replacing them with new on-premise and cloud applications, or upgrading them to digitally connect and enable their business processes.

The restaurant group standardized its core financial ERP applications for its international operations on Oracle JD Edwards, but the release it is on (9.0) has fallen behind Oracle’s commercial supported release (9.2). Their US operations were relying on PeopleSoft, whose technology evolution and roadmap were falling behind in supporting their needs.

The client embarked on an application modernization roadmap to upgrade international ERP to JDE 9.2 and migrate US financial system from PeopleSoft to JDE 9.2.

The Solution

The finance organization at the restaurant group evaluated various partners who have expertise in Oracle JDE technology and food industry, and selected Smartbridge to be its technology partner due to its successful track record in enabling technology transformation in the food industry at companies such as Whataburger, Darden Restaurants, etc.

Smartbridge brought its expertise in implementing JDE to enable the unique nature of multi-unit restaurant Sales, Inventory, AP, AR, Fixed Assets, Supply Chain, HR and payroll processes.

Achieved Modernization Objectives and Goals

Application Modernization

The requirements included migration of legacy to new applications or platforms, and the integration of new functionality to provide the latest capabilities to the business. They needed to be ready to support the demands of digital transformation initiatives that fuel the business growth in today’s competitive, fast-changing landscape.

Modernization options include re-platforming, re-hosting, recoding, re-architecting, re-engineering, interoperability, replacement, and retirement, as well as changes to the application architecture to clarify which option should be selected.

The Results

As the restaurant group’s technology partner, Smartbridge successfully achieved the application modernization objectives and goals during the course of a multi-year relationship:

The US JDE implementation was very complex, and required integrations with over 125 internal applications and external business partners.

It also required implementation of a specialized AR system and a custom Daily Sales Reconciliation process, in addition to all other typical implementation aspects.