Good Article highlighting the impact of DTS on Pizza Hut Australia

Pizza Hut Australia achieves 16% growth in consumer spend with Oracle

Leesa Maunders

With more than 260 stores across continent, Pizza Hut Australia is undergoing a major digital transformation with the aim of taking a larger slice of the pizza market. A longstanding Oracle MICROS customer, Pizza Hut Australia recently made the move from the legacy RES point of sale system to Oracle’s cloud-based point of sale platform, Simphony.

Business need

After global stay-at-home orders forced closures of their brick-and-mortar locations, Pizza Hut Australia needed a point-of-sale system that could support their existing online ordering and delivery model while allowing them the flexibility to explore new revenue channels. Pizza Hut Australia needed a way to harness the latest technology to attract new customers and redefine its approach to customer engagement.

Solution

Pivotal to the transformation Pizza Hut Australia has planned is the technology at the core of their operations – Oracle MICROS Simphony POS. The Oracle MICROS Simphony point of sale platform has an open system architecture, which means it can seamlessly pivot to an off-premises service model through simple APIs, providing the vehicle for innovation and growth.

After seeing the success this new strategy brought, Pizza Hut Australia used Oracle’s open API and extended partner network to integrate with third party applications while transforming their customer experience from the ground up.

Implementation

Key to Pizza Hut Australia’s back-of-house innovation is its partnership with Dragontail, a member of the Oracle Partner Network. Using cutting-edge AI technology, Pizza Hut Australia leverages Simphony’s open API to pave the way for technology that transforms the customer experience in the QSR and food delivery segments.

The enhanced experience already begins as soon as customers place their order online via website or mobile app where it is received through Simphony. Oracle’s cloud-based POS brings every transaction and customer interaction into a single source of truth. Then orders are automatically sent to the kitchen via KDS displays where staff can begin preparing orders.

However, the real power with Dragontail technology is its ability to improve store performance and customer satisfaction by achieving the best possible delivery times. When an order is received, the system informs the manager which aggregator has a driver available, and the order can get pushed to the delivery platform that has a driver on hand.

The Dragontail system is able to determine optimized delivery timing by accurately estimating how long it takes to prepare a pizza with when delivery drivers are contacted for pick-up. The Dragontail system is aimed at providing the lowest delivery time possible, whilst also optimizing labor costs and assuring that meals arrive to the customer “hot and fresh.”

For example, if the system knows it takes three minutes to prepare a pizza and eight minutes to cook, the system will send an alert to start cooking the pizza when a free driver is 11 minutes from the store.

Pizza Hut Australia works with several delivery aggregators such as Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Menulog, and DoorDash. When partnered with Dragontail, Pizza Hut Australia can automatically plan the most optimal routes for drivers and combine orders by location. This means no pizza is cooked and sitting around waiting for the driver.

Results

According to NPD CREST research, in the three quarters to September 2020, Pizza Hut had been the fastest growing QSR brand in Australia with growth of 16.1%, twice that of its competitors.

“We’re very proud of the infrastructure we’ve been able to set up with Oracle at the core. Within 12 hours of the first lockdown in Australia, we rolled out contactless delivery,” said Patrick Branley, Director of Technology, Pizza Hut Australia, “All of this was made possible due to Oracle’s ability to integrate quickly and easily with other tech solutions.”

Hear more from Patrick Branley by registering for Virtual Connect

There are many exciting new changes just around the corner for the F&B industry and Oracle is happy to continue the conversation about the future of QSR during our spring Virtual Connect from April 27-29^th. Be sure to register and learn more from Patrick during our Asia Pacific executive customer panel where he will be joined by Christian Klingner, Technology Operations Manager for Minor DKL Food Group and Mike Palmer, operations director for Outback Steakhouse.