Outsourcing: The Brinker Experience

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Outsourcing The Brinker Experience

• Robert Hess
• Director of Software Services

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Agenda

• Who is Brinker?
• What are the IT Challenges?
• Why outsource?
• The Brinker experience

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Who Is Brinker?

• First Chilis built in 1975
• Chilis Inc. was purchased by Norman Brinker in
  1983
• Renamed to Brinker International in 1991
• Annual sales 3 billion
• Currently we have 1100 restaurants
• In 47 states
• In 20 countries
• Annual growth rate of 15

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Who Is Brinker?
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Who Is Brinker?

• Fortune Magazine honored Brinker as one of
  Americas Most Admired Companies, ranking
  Brinker the number one company in the entire food
  service industry in management quality, employee
  talent, product quality and innovation.

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IT Challenges

• Operations focused company Very dynamic
  business
• Multiple Concepts / Different Business Models
• Corporate and Franchise Needs
• Store Environments
• 800 individual networks
• Point of Sale Environments
• Recent WAN implementation
• Critical business data distributed in 800
  locations

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IT Challenges

• IT strategy
• How do we keep the wheels on the current
  systems and migrate the systems to future
  technology solutions?
• What are the specific skill set gaps?
• Where do I find / how can I afford the talent
  needed?
• How do I know how many people I need?

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Why Outsource?

• Clear backlog of maintenance requests
• Release resources for focusing on strategic
  initiatives
• Achieve cost savings without compromising on
  service levels
• Achieve flexibility in staffing quick ramp-up /
  ramp-down
• Improve time to market for launching new services
• Improve stability and reliability of the
  applications
• Introduce process culture in IT

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The Brinker Experience

• After a thorough evaluation process, we
  identified Cognizant Technology Solutions for the
  following reasons
• Experienced player in the outsourcing arena.
• Excellent customer retention and referral
• Well defined processes that are ISO 9001
  certified and CMM Level 5 assessed
• Good communications infrastructure and
  highly-qualified and experienced technical and
  managerial personnel
• Outsourcing model.
• The scalability of resources.

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The Brinker Experience

• Kicked off the project in October 1999 at Dallas
  for application value management of
• Brinker Store System (size 6453 FP)
• Brinker Catering System (size 5003 FP)
• Set up a simulate lab offshore creating a trusted
  and highly secure physical and electronic
  environment
• Clearly defined configuration management,
  replication and source code management

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The Brinker Experience
Production
Beta Sites
Onsite
Iterative Development
Requirements Gathering
Analysis / Prototyping
High Level Design
Acceptance Testing
Offshore
High Level Design
Detailed Design
Construction
Testing - Integral / System
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Outsourcing Onsite-Offshore Composition for
Typical Development
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Staffing Patterns
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Case Study 1 Gift Card

• Business situation
• Extremely critical, must-go-live before holiday
  season begins in October
• Integration with corporate back-office
  applications and third party integration with
  payment gateway
• Requirements gathering began in early June
• Project size - 645 person-days of effort

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Case Study 1 Gift Card...

• Cognizant solution...
• Integrated all applications and payment gateway
• Created a dedicated and highly skilled team
  onsite and offshore
• Gift Card transaction data now available in data
  warehouse
• Created an application that ensured fraud
  detection
• Provided for cross-branding opportunities and
  special event cards
• Increased revenues from Gift Card Sales by 25

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Case Study 2 Catering System

• Business situation
• New focus on catering business was showing great
  revenue potential
• Catering business growth was limited by no
  software to support their new business model
• We built 5 different prototype versions of
  catering software to support 5 different concepts
  with different business models.
• And of course, no documentation about what was
  different about the software versions.

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Case Study 2 Catering System

• Cognizant solution
• During knowledge transfer, completely documented
  the system
• Worked with Brinker resources to establish a
  consolidation plan for the different version of
  the system
• Established a team who became familiar with the
  current software and could provide support
• Developed a common release 1.0 with complete
  automated testing process
• Current release is 1.1 and quality was above my
  expectations

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First Web based project

• Custom developed Web based financial software
  using our WAN infrastructure to eliminate
  duplication of effort and simplify
  reconciliation issues.
• Enterprise application integration of AS400
  financials and Brinker Store System
• Where we are
• Provided staff with skill sets in building
  e-business applications.
• Provided assistance with architecture review and
  capacity planning.
• 10 man year effort scheduled for 8 months
  elapsed time
• Project is currently at the end of the high level
  design phase and is on schedule.

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Is it working?

• Clear backlog of maintenance requests
• Release resources for focusing on strategic
  initiatives
• Achieve cost savings without compromising on
  service levels
• Achieve flexibility in staffing quick ramp-up /
  ramp-down
• Improve time to market for launching new services
• Improve stability and reliability of the
  applications
• Introduce process culture in IT

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Schedule and Effort Tracking
Schedule Variance
Effort Variance
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Risk and Defect Monitoring
Risk Monitoring
Defect Prevention
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SLA Monitoring
SLA Monitoring
SLA Monitoring
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Keys to Successful Outsourcing

• Obtain buy-in from within the organization
• Develop a management plan, including
• Strong executive leadership
• Transition strategy
• Experienced change manager acceptable to the
  affected groups and a clear change plan that is
  funded and resourced
• Informed feedback and swift issue resolution

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Key to Successful Outsourcing...

• Visit offshore facilities and get a touch and
  feel of the vendor
• Kick-off a project with non-critical tasks as the
  first engagement and then transition to more
  critical ones
• Invest in hosting a permanent relationship
  manager from the vendor at homesite

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Thank You