How Pizza Hut Expanded Their ICT Technology Information Technology Essay

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that ICT use in marketing plays in the processes of product innovation, as an element that strengthens the cooperation and communication among agents within the innovation project, reducing the difficulties to innovation and enhancing the development of differentiated products.

Findings

Two ideas stand out from the critical analysis of ict use in marketing.

First, Intensive ICT use in marketing makes the company more innovative, as it shows that its usage breaks down difficulty to innovation and speeds up processes that in turn become more efficient.

Second, Increasing ICT use in marketing encourages company tendency to act as a team with and join together particular agents within the business environment in the development of the innovation process, improving the amount of adaptation of the new product to market demands.

BACKGROUND

Pizza Hut was founded in 1958 by brothers Dan and Frank Carney in their hometown of Kansas. By 1972, with 314 stores nationwide, Pizza Hut went public on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1978, Pizza Hut was acquired by PepsiCo, who later also bought KFC and Taco Bell. In 1997, the three restaurant chains were spun off into Tricon, and in 2001 joined with Long John Silver’s and A&W Restaurants to become Yum! Brands

INTRODUCTION

With annual sales of more than £300 million, selling pizza and pasta is big business for Pizza Hut. With customers facing an ever-increasing choice of restaurants, all offering a variety of foods and competitively priced meals, Pizza Hut must remain flexible and customer focused to retain its market leading position.

New product developments and continued growth of its 600 outlets are just two ways in which the company stays ahead. Pizza Hut also recognises the importance of IT to support the Business and invests in technology both to support its operations and to provide management information.

 Benefits of ICT

With the new system in place, Pizza Hut’s goal of improving the overall effectiveness of its crew has been achieved. Customers are now served more quickly than before; especially during peak times such as lunch when they have only limited time available. Pizza Hut can currently provide its main food servers with a mobile computer, while other personnel carry out supporting tasks, such as preparing drinks and serving dishes. Food servers with a PDA are now able to be much closer to customers and be of assistance when needed, keeping customers happy and satisfied.

ICT SUPPORT COMPANY FOR PIZZA HUT

 Since 1992 Pizza Hut has relied upon Sopra Group to provide daily support and strategic management services for their key financial and operational systems.

By outsourcing the support and management of their main IT systems, Pizza Hut has noted definite signs of cost saving. Pizza Hut has renewed agreement on several occasions to get services from them due to the specialist skills and value for money provided.

Since taking responsibility for Pizza Hut’s IT operations, Sopra Group also combined day to day systems support with development of new applications and strategic .consultancy. The Sopra Group provide technical and business skills to develop Pizza Hut’s Data Warehouse. The Data Warehouse holds details of food sales throughout the outlets and enables the restaurant chain’s business managers to analyse customer demands and preference to target special promotions and offers.

ICT Managers remarks

” With Sopra Group we have access to a much wider technical knowledge base. We have the reassurance that for detailed and complex questions and programming requirements, we can call Sopra Group, freeing us to focus on the business. With their technical know-how and experience of managing our systems, we have confidence that the consultants can handle such a complex project.”

What does company cover?

Sopras department doesn’t just cover the head office it’s responsible for all the systems across all the restaurants too. From carrying out PC support, they are also covers all sorts of IT projects from setting up through to delivery. This might include looking at the processes surrounding bank reconciliations, maintaining pizza huts infrastructure or developing the company intranet as a business device,

SYSTEMS THEY USE

MICROS/EPSON

PA962

PDA 

TOUCH SCREEN MONITORS

DNA/ONLINE ORDERING

EUROPE (PDA/PA962)

Before implementing its new wireless system, order-taking was rather time consuming and could lead to mistakes such as incorrect orders being served to customers. The food servers used to take handwritten orders while often also preparing and serving drinks at the customer’s table. Only after serving the table was food server able to deliver the handwritten order to the kitchen. And because these orders were often quickly written down, this could result in an order being wrongly made by the kitchen staff.

In order for taking hand written order it was taking up more time was the fact that the cashier was required to key the orders into the system when customers were checking out. This procedure could also result in wrong items being entered, potentially resulting in a loss of business or a poor level of customer satisfaction.

The new solution made it possible to take orders at the table using Unitech’s PA962 wireless terminal. With the use of wireless communication, orders are sent from the PA962 via an intermediate server to the POS systems, as well as to the different work stations such as bar and kitchen for preparing appetizers and main courses. Each work station has its own network printer for printing the assigned order. 

  ENGLAND/ASIA

As everyone knows pizza hut is leading with continuous menu innovation and different type of pizzas. The system pizza hut was using since 1980 was showing was showing sign of age especially in its ability to do in store work properly and helping management decision making, that’s why they had to change it to bring It up to date. To get an advantage over their rivals, they approached quite a lot of system providers with 6 short listed to provide them the system they can be comfortable with. At the end they decided to go for micros Fidelio. But there were some aspect that they had to change in order to fulfil that agreement they had with pizza hut. By 2005 all pizza hut delivery stores were using micros as their system and all the new restaurants.

DNA/ONLINE ORDERING

DNA is currently used to service 370 Pizza Hut restaurants across the UK.

By utilizing DNA’s report functions, the Pizza Hut marketing team has access to management information, which is also shared with other departments such as marketing and business development.

Intranet

Intranet is a secure way of communication between the head office and store level rather than compromising their security by using internet. Pizza hut intranet is very useful where you can find all the standards, contact details, new developments on marketing and plans for future. All the training of the pizza hut is on intranet rather then sending it by post they just post it on intranet so everyone can benefit from it.

IMPORTANCE OF ICT IN MARKETING

 As the growing demands of business and furious competition between competitors heats up everyone is trying to get an edge to persuade customers that they are value for money. In that kind of scenario ict plays a major role, because everyone’s busy in their life that’s why fast food business is booming in recession as well. Customers don’t want to spend really long on phones whilst the order takers take really long to process their order. That’s why an up to date and fast system requires satisfying customers need.

ONE STOP FOR ALL

Here are some examples that how pizzas hut is using their system to their full advantage.

Scheduling/forecasting

Determine peak and off peak season

Balanced score card

Leaflet distribution

Performance management

Product forecasting

ORDER TAKING

ORDER MAKING

SALES PLAN

COST OF SALES

FOOD ORDERS

PERFROMANCE MANAGEMENT

FORECAST

SCHEDULE

MICROS

SYSTEM.

PA962

ORDER TAKING

SPEED

ACCURACY

SATISFIED

CUSTOMERS

Recommendations

Since pizza hut is already a business leader in the fast food market, they have loads of option for a number of tactics.

Thorough research of their ict system on store level rather than doing it on higher level to get in touch with customers and staff need, because the main reason for keep improving their systems is to get more customers and to get more sales.

There are still some flaws in their system.

Problems that needs sorting

System doesn’t update automatically if it does it takes really long time.

Keep changing the functions of their systems every two months.

Not enough training for staff.

Conclusion

Pizza hut has seen many changes, good and bad during its duration of the business. But they knew as long as their marketing is up to certain standard they will pull through with every challenge they face in marketing, they have an opportunity to improve their marketing style with the help of Ict.

There is still a question mark over the technology that pizza hut uses. A time will come when they have think about changing their strategy and how they view their ict development. In order to keep up with today’s environment.