MENA’s leading food company nurtures data-driven culture to deliver customer service at its finest

Founded in Kuwait in 1964, The Americana Group was the first food manufacturing and distributing company to introduce QSRs in the Middle East region. Today, with more than 2000 restaurants and 25 food production sites in countries such as the UAE, KSA, Kuwait, and Egypt, it remains at the forefront of the F&B industry.

Employee empowerment and ownership underlie its commercial success. "Many companies attach huge importance to technology," says Amarpal Sandhu, Chief Executive Officer at Americana. "We are more focused on the inside process—how we interact with people and what changes we bring.” In line with Americana’s guiding principle of 'Great People, Great Food = Great Company,’ the company equips teams with skills to deliver excellent customer service and make work rewarding.

An appetite for data

The Americana Restaurants leaders needed more insights into their business to improve strategic business decision making. "We wanted to transition to a fully data-driven organization to grow revenue, reduce losses, and serve customers better," begins Oksana Staniszewska, Chief People Officer at Americana. "To achieve that, we needed to empower people with a single source of truth, functional insights, and easy but secure access to information."

The sales and marketing teams had used enterprise business intelligence software for activity planning and management. However, it had limited analytics capabilities and lacked user dashboards with meaningful visuals of data. Without a centralized data warehouse as well, it failed to provide full visibility of the more than 2,000 restaurants managed by the company. "We now integrated Azure data warehouse with semantic layer so that anyone can use data through Self Service BI”" shares Navdeep Agarwal, Head of Business Intelligence. To make better use of data and achieve a single source of truth, the Business Intelligence team has built a cloud-based data modern warehouse based on Azure services.

Informed teams for data-driven decisions

The stakeholders can login on the web or mobile application to see the results of each analysis via the 150 Power BI dashboards created till date. “The dashboard offers insights such as sales from particular channels, the best-and worst-selling food item, and the most profitable restaurants across all brands and markets” states Agarwal. "The stakeholder can also contact the BI support team about issues via an easily accessible help link. Consequently, we are capable of responding all the requests across the markets in an efficient and productive way.

Having this kind of data transparency makes work more effective for the financial planning and analysis team. Agarwal explains, "Just imagine— you can drill down from the holistic market/brand view of daily P&L statement to an individual restaurant or in some cases restaurant managers and identify the line item that can help optimize revenue.” In addition, the team has saved time by automating manual tasks with Power BI, allowing employees to focus on higher-value work. “Previously, it was next to impossible to evaluate 2,000+ balanced score sheets and accumulate all data by hand," says Agarwal. "Now, all tasks are achieved with a single click, consuming two minutes rather than a couple of days.”