How Domino's delivers pizza in 30 minutes

The food industry isn’t synonymous with early technology adoption. However, the need to create a competitive differentiator, and meet soaring customer expectations has forced companies in this sector to turn to technology.

Jubilant FoodWorks, the master franchisee for Domino's and Dunkin' Donuts in India, delivers 200,000 pizzas to 100,000 customers every day across the nation. The USP for Domino’s lies in its commitment of fulfilling an order within 30 minutes.

Anand Thakur, CDO, Jubilant FoodWorks, reveals the technology that helps Domino’s meet this.

Making every minute count

"Food tech industry has its own specific needs when it comes to digital transformation," Anand Thakur, CDO, Jubilant FoodWorks, says.

Unlike e-commerce companies, the food order has to flow into the restaurant within a minute or two of the customer exercising the option else the narrow hunger window would shut. Similarly, the delivery feed management is more complex in the food tech sector as every minute counts.

Thakur started the digital journey by developing an innovative customer-facing application. Rated highly at 4.4 on android, the application is claimed to be the lightest in the industry. Besides, the app is also press sensitive.

"We came up with an innovation where the customer just has to long press the application icon and his last order will be processed again. This innovation was a result of high repeat rate of Domino's customers. We have also launched Alexa voice skill where the full-fledged order flow and delivery update is given through the virtual assistant,” Thakur says.

The customer journey with Domino's starts when the buyer browses the application to place an order. Domino's uses AI-based forecasting model that tells the system whether the customer will actually place an order or not.

"We are using AI, coupled with historical data and behaviour analysis, for order forecasting for each restaurant. For us, forecasting at the national level does not help because the demand has to be fulfilled for a specific area at a particular hour. This prediction happens at every half an hour, thereby helping the QSRs to prepare themselves for the peak hours and to maintain the inventory," says Thakur.

Further explain how IT powers service delivery he says, "It's the Order Propensity model that we work on. This model gives us the probability of a customer placing an order based on his click trails, behaviour analysis and historical data.”

"Once you add a pizza to the cart, the probability sets to 60 percent that you will place the order. Now, you go and choose the address for the order delivery, which increases the probability to 80 percent. The system now pushes the order to the restaurant. While you reach the payment option, the probability gets as high as 95 percent. By the time the whole payment process is completed, the order is already half-way made," Thakur reveals.

Though the model has been optimised to keep food wastage to a minimum, Jubilant FoodWorks is still tweaking it to make it more efficient.

The delivery feed management is fully automated. It understands where a delivery person is through his GPS co-ordinates and assigns the next delivery accordingly.

Thakur believes "Innovation has to enhance consumer experience and optimize back office systems for employees."

Underlining the importance of integrated systems, he says, "At the end of the day, all systems have to talk to each other. We sometimes develop technology in silos. Until all systems talk to each other, maximum benefit from digital transformation cannot be availed," he opines.

Domino's will soon be introducing a voice-based inventory taking system where the assigned person will have to just voice out the quantity of material received, and it will automatically be fed into the ERP. Currently, this is being done part manually.

Source:- https://retail.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/food-entertainment/food-services/how-dominos-delivers-pizza-in-30-minutes/71754420