Jollibee taps AWS for digital upgrade

MANILA, Philippines — Fast-food giant Jollibee Foods Corp. has tapped Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive its digital transformation as its preferred cloud provider globally.

The Jollibee Group is migrating its IT infrastructure from its data centers in the Philippines, parts of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and North America to AWS, enabling the company to respond to changes in consumer behavior more quickly, like those brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic which drove a significant rise in delivery orders.

Leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS capabilities, including analytics and database services, the Jollibee Group is also becoming a data-driven enterprise to gain greater visibility into its sales data and supply chain operations. To accelerate the move to cloud, Jollibee’s global headquarters in the Philippines is leading the charge in the migration to AWS, which has helped the group reduce costs, streamline IT management, and innovate new services.

In the last 18 months, social distancing restrictions, lockdowns, and limits on in-person dining made food demand difficult to predict as customers’ dining habits changed. To make it more convenient for customers to buy the food they love, the Jollibee Group needed to better understand these evolving dining requirements.

The Jollibee Group’s operations in the Philippines used Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for high-performance applications at any scale, to help tag, monitor and create sales reports. Using Amazon Athena, an interactive query service, the group automates the creation of operational dashboards based on sales reports to provide real-time restaurant insights on best-selling menu items, ordering and combination preferences, results of sales promotions, and restaurant revenues. These insights enable the Jollibee Group to stock inventory and allocate staff more efficiently.

With AWS, the Jollibee Group can also remotely monitor and analyze food inventory across the company’s manufacturing facilities, commissaries, and distribution centers throughout the Philippines, better scale production based on spikes in demand (during national holidays), and more efficiently dispatch food to its restaurant network nationwide.

“AWS has helped us transform our operations in the cloud, allowing us to act quickly as dining habits continue to evolve,” said Yoly Chua, head of business technology for the Philippines and EMEA of the Jollibee Group. “Advanced AWS capabilities, like analytics, are a key enabler for us to become a data-driven organization that can innovate across all areas of the business, from supply chain operations to point-of-sale. The cloud helps to ensure our customer experience is excellent in both the restaurants and at drive-thru eateries.”

“The Jollibee Group has continued serving its customers right through a difficult time for our region, and with AWS they are forging a new data-driven path to further drive customer experience,” said Conor McNamara, director of ASEAN AWS Commercial Sales. “We look forward to helping the Jollibee Group’s brands leverage AWS’s unmatched portfolio of cloud capabilities to weather this storm and emerge stronger with new and innovative offerings that delight customers.”