KFC ENHANCES DATA SHARING CAPABILITIES AND IMPROVES REPORTING WITH SNOWFLAKE

Since opening its first Australian restaurant in Guildford, New South Wales, in 1968, KFC has grown to become one of the largest quick-service restaurants in the nation. The company now has more than 700 restaurants across Australia serving more than 2 million customers each week. 

As KFC’s Australian operations grew over the years, the company became increasingly reliant on data to guide its operations and ensure the delivery of first-class customer service.  

Until March 2019, data collected from a range of sources—including delivery channels, marketing campaigns and supply chains—was stored in a single SQL database located in the company’s core data center. While this worked well for an extended period, by 2019, it could no longer provide the level of performance required. 

KFC realized the rising volume of data had made it increasingly difficult for the database to perform core tasks. The ultimate obstacle was when a requirement emerged to generate reports of restaurant sales by channel per day. The existing database couldn’t support this level of analysis. While scripts would be kicked off to create tables, the job would never complete. 

The KFC IT team’s Data Architect, Luis Bastos, considered simply replacing the database with a larger database; however, he quickly realized this would not deliver the capabilities needed to extract as much value as possible from the company’s data and provide the scalability needed.

In May 2019, after evaluating a range of alternatives to its legacy database, the KFC IT team made the decision to migrate to Snowflake. “Snowflake appealed to us because we could see we would be able to undertake initial testing without incurring a lot of upfront costs,” says Bastos. “Also, we were already familiar with cloud platforms as we had been using Azure for some of our workloads. We could see, though, that Azure would not be the  best fit for our core database.” 

The Snowflake deployment began with a proof of concept that involved running the same set of reports that had proven too great a burden for the SQL database. Instead of the reports being delivered in hours or even days, they were generated in just 20 seconds—without requiring any additional steps to enhance the process. Once they were completed, the reports  could be generated almost instantly.

Once the Snowflake platform was fully operational, KFC’s IT team quickly began to notice significant benefits. 

In some ways, it’s not even fair to compare the performance of KFC’s legacy database with Snowflake. Snowflake is a totally different generation of technology for KFC, which now supports more than 10,000 data extractions and reports every day.

Snowflake has also significantly improved the way in which KFC shares data with its franchisee partners and with other external parties who undertake analysis work. 

Prior to the deployment, data sharing required large data sets to be copied to an instance within Azure, which was then made available to approved parties. This was a cumbersome process that put a lot of strain on the in-house SQL database. 

With Snowflake, the same set of data is shared so there is no need to copy it or move it to a different location. It also ensures that all parties are looking at the most up-to-date data available.

At that time, Bastos was the only Data Architect in the IT team, and he was tasked with sharing data with external companies. “KFC’s data sharing processes changed from taking days to being completed in just seconds,” says Bastos. “This allows access to more data faster and allows us to achieve greater insights and enhance our advanced analytics capabilities.”

The shift to Snowflake has also resulted in a reduction in KFC’s overall database operational costs of around 70%.

The Snowflake platform is also allowing KFC to improve its service to customers by better understanding their preferences. Data is collected securely from a range of sources, including the company's mobile app, the KFC website and in-store point-of-sale terminals. 

According to Bastos, “This allows us to build a profile of customers and gain an insight into their ordering habits. This, in turn, ensures that our menu of offerings is always in line with what our customers expect and want.”

In coming months, the KFC team plans to focus its attention on data science initiatives. The team intends to improve innovation levels within the company through the use of predictive and advanced analytics, which is anticipated to enhance internal automation processes. 

There are also plans to extend the partner ecosystem with access to data through Snowflake Secure Data Sharing. This will further increase efficiency and save time as data won’t have to be anonymized before it is used.