Wendy’s serves quality customer and employee experiences with Oracle Cloud

Wendy’s, the second-largest fast food burger chain in the United States, is on a mission to create joy and opportunity through food, family, and community. The company’s vision is to become the world's most thriving and beloved restaurant brand. To support this, its leadership recognized the need for a new business system that would meet evolving customer, employee, and franchisee demands.

The company was using an older version of Oracle E-Business Suite, which was less efficient and effective for the business over time, especially with users spread across different working environments using various devices. It was difficult to update, required a significant amount of manual effort to maintain and use, and lacked the desired level of support for the business teams. It also had limited self-service capabilities, making it challenging for business managers and their teams to handle tasks on their own, without support from human resources or technology teams. The quick-service chain sought an agile solution that would adapt to the company’s strategy to surpass customer expectations and cater to the diverse needs of its employees and franchisees.

With the goal of taking its culture into the digital realm without sacrificing its core values, Wendy’s initiated a cloud transformation in 2020 to enhance the brand’s business operations and global expansion.

As a longtime Oracle customer, Wendy’s had confidence that Oracle could deliver rapid results and a solid user experience to customers, employees, and franchisees. Oracle Cloud fell in line with the company’s goal to boost business system efficiencies and effectiveness, allowing employees to focus on delivering quality food and service.

Wendy’s leadership saw value in an integrated solution with Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM). In addition, they recognized that migrating complementary workloads and data to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as an initial first step in the transformation journey would help mitigate risk during the cloud implementation.

Recognizing that this was just as much a business transformation as a technology one, Wendy’s valued Oracle’s ability to replicate positive experiences for different users. The unified solution would also be crucial in supporting its people where and how they work, whether in a corporate or restaurant setting, empowering employees and franchisees to succeed in any environment.

Wendy’s embarked on a phased deployment, taking a finance-first approach. While migrating some existing Oracle E-Business Suite workloads to OCI, the company implemented Oracle Cloud EPM. With its enterprise data management capabilities, the platform allowed Wendy’s to simplify its chart of account structure, provide visibility across the organization, and easily generate accurate financial and operational reports. The solution also enabled users to collaborate and connect planning across different business units to respond quickly to market conditions and grow the business.

Wendy’s implemented Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud EPM concurrently, gaining a fully integrated cloud suite for enterprise-wide finance and operations. With key business processes linked together, the company enjoyed the benefits of connected data stored in a secure environment with automatic monthly patches, while end-to-end workflows yielded significant boosts in efficiency. To enhance the franchisee experience, a new billing management solution was also built as an extension of Oracle Cloud ERP to make it easier for these entities to manage payments and business transactions with Wendy’s.

After the financial phase of the implementation, Wendy’s will deploy Oracle Cloud HCM, with the goal of empowering workers with tools, insights, and self-service capabilities to gain more autonomy over their career paths. With employees spread out across different working environments, the platform will allow users to work how they want while delivering quality digital interactions from anywhere on any device. By integrating Oracle Cloud HCM with the existing Oracle Cloud ERP solution, the unified platform will also ensure that Wendy’s teams have real-time data available to make decisions faster.

To facilitate the move to Oracle Cloud Applications and to reduce the company’s reliance on on-premises technologies, Wendy’s first migrated its existing Oracle E-Business Suite applications to OCI. Technical staff worked with Oracle Cloud Lift Services to migrate more than 21 databases to Oracle Exadata Database Service. Oracle Exadata provided advanced cloud automation and dynamic resource scaling, which helped Wendy’s mitigate risk during its cloud implementation and experience the highest levels of performance, scale, and availability for its E-Business Suite workloads. As a result of this proof of concept, the chain began migrating other complementary applications and workloads from on-premises to OCI.

With Oracle Cloud, Wendy’s gained a unified system with the goal to create fast, fun, and frictionless user experiences across the entire enterprise.