PizzaExpress feeds digital transformation with Office 365 and Microsoft Azure

For PizzaExpress, being open for business means more than a hot oven and fresh ingredients. It’s about delivering exceptional experiences through a customer-centric, data-driven approach backed by world-class cloud technology from Microsoft.

PizzaExpress adopted a cloud-first approach for its 570 restaurants in the UK, Ireland, Middle East, India and the Far East, including China. Siobhan Fagan, IT Director at PizzaExpress explains, “We saw moving to Office 365 as an opportunity to remove cost, increase security and kind of make everything easier to manage. We're now in one instance of Office 365 across the globe.”

Download video transcript

Putting customers at the heart of its business requires ongoing analysis. “Something that was really important to us was to make sure that we could understand our customers and all of their interactions with PizzaExpress” continues Fagan. The company migrated data from various 3rd party agencies into its own Azure data warehouse and relaunched its customer-facing app. The content from the app comes from The PizzaExpress website which is also hosted in Azure, “That meant we could scale to cope with the excess demand we had in the first few weeks of launching the app, then scale back as we got over that initial offer point” says Fagan.

Previously, the restaurant’s 30 regional managers would spend every Monday collating and interpreting results from the week before. Customer data was kept separate from other financial and operational data, but now through PowerBI, all KPIs are combined to show overall performance relating to our customers, staff, sales and profits. “The scorecard brings all of my restaurants into one place so I can see all of the KPIs across the business for every one of my restaurants,” explains Regional Operations Manager, Tom Hatcher. “This gives me real-time information so I can make the right business decisions.”

The full-service capability of Office 365 and the Azure cloud gives PizzaExpress the tools, freedom and scalability to think big and say ‘yes’ to new ideas and innovation. As Fagan concludes, “I feel totally privileged and I am so totally proud of everything that my team have achieved.”