Jollibee Foods Corporation taps AWS cloud to meet customers’ changing dining habits

However, the pandemic has had a significant impact on the restaurant and fast food industry globally. According to Defend Jobs Philippines, in 2020, 80% of small food establishments in major provinces in the Philippines were hit by losses due to multiple lockdowns, which has forced hundreds, if not thousands, of restaurants to close shop.

Around the world, social distancing restrictions, lockdowns, and limits on in-person dining have also radically changed dining habits, making food demand more difficult to predict.

Like most restaurants, the king of fried chicken in the Philippines was not spared from the impact of Covid-19. Nevertheless, the Jollibee Group remains optimistic about sales recovery given the digitization of food ordering, remote work, and greater reliance on delivery and take-outs.

In response to a new restaurant landscape, the Group in 2021 invested in a business transformation plan which included upgrades to its delivery, drive-thru, and take-out platforms to stay abreast of evolving dining trends and consumer behavior, making it more convenient for customers to keep buying the food they love.

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer in the Philippines, the Jollibee Group has already experienced first-hand the power of the cloud - how they can leverage data analytics to better understand and respond more quickly to customer needs, such as the significant rise in delivery orders driven by the pandemic.

To empower its businesses around the world with the same insight, the Group selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider globally. This meant migrating its IT infrastructure from its data centers in the Philippines, parts of Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and North America to AWS.

To accelerate the move to cloud, the Group’s global headquarters in the Philippines is leading the charge with their migration to AWS. The Group worked with AWS Partner, DXC Technology, to decommission its on-premises data centers and migrate its mission-critical SAP workloads such as financial, supply chain, and human resources data to AWS in less than 24 hours. This helped the Group reduce costs, streamline IT management, and innovate new services.

The Jollibee Group is focused on becoming even more data-driven. By leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS capabilities, including analytics and database services, it is able to gain greater visibility into its sales data and supply chain operations.

For instance, the Group’s operations in the Philippines used Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for high-performance applications at any scale to help tag, monitor, and create sales reports.

The Group also used Amazon Athena, an interactive query service, to automate the creation of operational dashboards based on sales reports. This offering provides real-time insights into restaurant services, best-selling menu items, ordering and combination preferences, as well as results of sales promotions and restaurant revenues.

Collectively, these enhanced insights enable the Group to remotely monitor and analyze its stock inventory across its manufacturing facilities, commissaries, and distribution centres throughout the Philippines, and better scale production based on spikes in demand. The Group can also more efficiently dispatch food to its restaurant network nationwide, and allocate staff more efficiently.

With crisis comes opportunity. Using the power of cloud technology with AWS, the Jollibee Group is well-positioned to take advantage of new opportunities and improved traffic as Covid-19 measures ease up in due time.

By further improving its overall customer satisfaction, helped by enhanced digital and dining experiences from restaurant to drive-thru, Jollibee is also set to convert stronger consumer demand into more loyal customers.

“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, Jollibee Foods Corporation. “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.”

“The Jollibee Group has continued serving its customers right through a difficult time in our region, and with AWS they are forging a new data-driven path to further drive customer experience,” said Conor McNamara, managing director for ASEAN, AWS. “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.”