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Case study

The challenge

Maintaining corporate and financial applications using 40-year-old legacy technology created operational cost and risk for a world-renowned restaurant chain. The system was supported by a wealth of internal knowledge, but there was almost no documentation. To mitigate this risk, the client wanted to transition off the existing system. In addition to the constraints of doing business using the legacy system, the restaurant chain had difficulty collating sales information from more than 37,000 of its restaurants across the world. Challenges with the monthly sales close process and timing added inefficiencies and reporting constraints. Maintaining business data from three different business lines further complicated the month-end close process. This scenario, combined with already limited skilled resources to maintain the legacy systems, led to inconsistencies on reported sales within enterprise systems. The global fast-food chain partnered with Cognizant to modernize its mission-critical sales data management system.

Our approach

We initiated the project with discussions on how best to re-engineer the existing system architecture. We proposed a discovery phase to document each business process, leveraging reverse-engineering tools. We then created detailed documentation to capture the as-is state and separated the legacy and tech-based monolithic solutions and moved them to a cloud-native digital solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS). After finalizing the technical design, we planned three sequential releases and began building the framework of the new system. Throughout the project, we held product demos and sprint reviews every three weeks with product, business and IT owners to gather feedback. We leveraged multiple AWS tools and technologies to provide a robust, mobile-compatible sales modernization system integrated on the AWS platform. The autoscaling system provides real-time data processing with high availability and the capacity to handle peak concurrent users.

A cloud-based digital ecosystem

The entirely new, modernized global sales system is now a single, integrated web application that collects, consolidates and reports worldwide sales data, covering the end-to-end sales-close process. We transformed five distributed, 40-year-old legacy systems into an integrated, intuitive, cloud-native and single-source-of-truth system that supports streamlined processes. The modernization program helps the client not only reduce its legacy footprint but also take a huge leap forward with digital transformation in its global enterprise system portfolio. The fast-food chain now enjoys the benefits of a single window, highly responsive, resilient and scalable cloud-based digital ecosystem that handles restaurant sales closure reporting and data reconciliation processes from all international and US domestic markets.

3+ million

incoming sales data transactions ingested and validated from 37,000+ stores worldwide within minutes

200

concurrent API invocations per sales submission

Cycle time cut

from one month to one hour to provision the cloud infrastructure