Flynn Restaurant Group began in 1999 with just 8 Applebee’s locations in Seattle and has grown to become the largest restaurant franchisee in the United States. The company has presence across the three major segments of the industry – Casual Dining, Quick Services, and Fast Casual with some of largest brands including Pizza Hut, Webdy's, Applebee’s, Arby’s, Taco Bell and Panera systems. The company operates over 2300 restaurants across the US, with 73,000 employees and $3.5B annual revenue sales. Flynn Restaurant Group’s unique recipe for success has led it to ~30% compound annual growth for over two decades.
Fylnn Restaurants depends on routing, preventative and emergency maintenance for its restaurant equipment to ensure 100% uptime at every location. After doubling their retail locations within a seven-year period, Flynn's maintenance and repair costs per location were extremely high and growing exponentially due to there being no streamlined visibility across retail locations for existing equipment warranties and corporate contracts.
Management would engage local technicians to resolve equipment malfunctions, resulting in higher MTTR (Mean-Time-to-Repair) and MCTR (Mean-Cost-to-Repair). This was due to the limited visibility that headquarters had for each location’s active maintenance contract; all of which were located within an SAP business system.
Without a centralized system to view relevant work order and maintenance contracts, each location would request and route them to the nearest service-contracted vendor. As a result, Flynn's asset uptime and retail location’s productivity were negatively impacted. Flynn initially considered building custom programs within their SAP business system to resolve this issue; however, the user experience that existed within their SAP system proved to be too cumbersome to scale.
The number of locations that needed to engage with these processes also made it too expensive and unrealistic to build within SAP. User experience and SAP integration were the keys to finding a solution to Flynn's problem, while also trying to minimize custom development within their actual SAP system.
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“Using Pillir gives us the speed and flexibility needed to rapidly drive our business outcomes with a lean IT staff. Flynnwas able to increase up-time on our retail location’s equipment significantly, while decreasing the cost to maintain that same equipment by digitizing our approval workflow process with Pillir. They built our first application, but now our team has the skill set to create more and are quickly leveraging the power of the EdgeReady Cloud to extend our SAP ERP business system and maximize its value.” Mike Woods CIO |