Pizza Hut Cuts Data Processing from Hours to Minutes with AWS

Since its founding in 1958, Pizza Hut has grown to become the largest pizza company in the world. It has over 18,000 restaurants in over 100 countries, and in Asia Pacific (APAC) alone, it operates more than 5,500 stores across 22 countries.

To streamline its data consolidation and analysis process, and gain faster insights on how its stores and franchises are performing across the Asia region, Pizza Hut embarked on a journey with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Searce, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner.

In January 2020, Pizza Hut started searching for a data solution that would be fast to implement and scale; provide easy visual access to store and franchisee performance; and deliver actionable insight for its marketing, operations, finance and development departments.

“We wanted an easy-to-implement single source of truth to replace our manual data collection process, where creating a regional report on how our 15 franchises were performing could take up to 16 hours,” said Pin Yiing Kwok, digital experience manager, Pizza Hut APAC.  

In the past, Pizza Hut’s data was collected manually—local teams would take up to 10 hours each month to individually input the data required for their business reports. Having an overview of the performance of Pizza Hut’s websites across all its APAC countries was also difficult, as it did not have a consolidated dashboard of its multiple websites.

In February 2020, Pizza Hut worked with Searce to create a modern, cloud-based data warehouse using AWS solutions.

Searce understood the challenges that were faced by Pizza Hut and created a data governed framework that ensures high data consistency, by making it easier to extend its architecture as new data sources become available. Searce also designed a data lake architecture, keeping the company’s data security in mind. To help Pizza Hut stay ahead of their quickly evolving customers, Searce developed customized dashboards that allowed Pizza Hut to perform analytics in near real-time. This enables Pizza Hut to leverage data at its fingertips to drive effective business intelligence decisions and ultimately, provide better customer experiences.

“Searce helped create automated dashboards that provided much quicker visualization and analytics of the performance of our stores in Asia Pacific based on revenue, transactions and customer engagement scores. These insights allow us to quickly alter consumer strategies as needed,” Kwok said. “Within two months, we could see whether the region was hitting sales targets and performance goals with green and red indicators. We could also drill down on any potential issues and identify what needed troubleshooting.”

Pizza Hut streamlined its data collection process by using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to consolidate data across its stores and third-party vendors on a single, secure, cloud storage platform. Running Amazon Redshift provides insights into its store data, where local teams can query petabytes of data in its data warehouse. This lets it derive swift, actionable insights to better serve its customers.

 “We were able to quickly leverage data pipelines that connected to more data sources, and can now develop unique business intelligence reports in minutes. We also have a 360-degree view of our customers and their buying journeys,” said Kwok.

Using AWS CloudTrail helped the company better understand who is accessing its data and simplify compliance efforts across different markets. Plus, running AWS Organizations helped it keep costs under control and simplify permission management and user access to data dashboards.

“The ability to access near real-time data is very powerful,” Kwok said. “In the past we used to wait a month before receiving insights on how marketing campaigns performed. Now we can review the performance data from the previous day and make adjustments where necessary.”

Pizza Hut is working with Searce and AWS to leverage user data to enhance customer experience with Pizza Hut. It plans to use AWS machine learning solutions to delve deeper into individual customer behavior and turn them into loyal customers, based on types of promotions, device platform, and the ideal time for outreach.

 To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/travel-and-hospitality.