Daunting Demands

Overnight, new rules apply to school lunches stipulating new counts for calories, sodium, and fats in every meal. Naturally, thousands of school lunches across the country fail to pass muster. Whitsons, with its mishmash of systems—like many other companies on the early digital journey—was underprepared to act fast.

As Whitsons quickly found out, in today's world, rapid change can come from any direction and at any time. At critical moments of change—as happened in 2010—companies must be able to pivot and act fast. That's yet another reason a DOM makes so much sense.

Suddenly, Whitsons clients across the board needed new menus. Each school's lunch program had to be assessed on an individual basis for nutritional content as well as new menus created based on myriad other factors, including:

• What foods could be sourced locally or nationally?
• What inventory already was available in warehouses?
• What to do about limited shelf life for existing inventories?
• How to factor in popular items in particular schools?

Adding to the chaos, each decision required a registered dietitian to dictate which foods and in what quantity were needed to abide by the new guidelines. Then, each needed to be cost out per plate using spreadsheet data from multiple locations. That was a monumental challenge for Whitsons because financial data among locations was kept in silos, making the process cumbersome and labor-intensive.

Tipping Point

Most people think of school lunches as something simple and easy like chicken nuggets and French fries or pizza and chips. The reality, however, is that they're hypercomplex.

Every school lunch is subject to regulatory compliance and nutritional requirements. Companies providing the lunches also have fiduciary and financial responsibilities because, says Whitsons CEO Paul Whitcomb, in a way they're managing money that belongs to various school districts. All this requires specialized skills ranging from nutrition, management, and finance to public relations related to interfacing with schools, communities, and school boards. To address all those different aspects requires a superhuman effort, he adds.

“We knew our legacy software wasn't meeting our needs,” says Whitsons CFO Beth Bunster. “It couldn't adequately support our business because various systems didn't talk to each other, double and triple information entry was required, and none of the electronic data linked with accounting. The company didn't even have real-time access to information. Instead, data already was old and outdated by weeks and even a month or more by the time it was received. Those kinds of delays may have been acceptable early in the company, but as Whitsons started to grow, so did the need for timely data and reports. Our real goal was real-time information to act on for the business.”

The problem was exacerbated by schools' summer recess, which included cafeteria staff. That meant the September blues—catch up and relearning—for students as well as cafeteria workers. And until the workers relearned the systems, Whitsons as the food service provider would spill money. The trouble, though, was because no real-time information was available until after the fact, it was impossible to identify the exact problem points in the chain.

Today's and Tomorrow's Journey

Whitsons quickly realized there had to be a better way to orchestrate its business. That meant a shift in the company's culture mindset. Siloed legacy thinking was out, replaced by an openness to the digitally savvy platform experience.

To begin the digital journey, the company first had to clearly analyze and thoroughly understand two fundamental factors on the business side and then the same on the technology side: how Whitsons' business processes were set up today and how the company wanted the business to operate in the future—As Is and To Be. This assessment then formed the foundation to create a company mindset that aligns strategy and execution into the same road map.

Bumps in the Road

Whitsons' assessment began by drawing an end-to-end map of the business and its existing processes. Sounds simple enough. But it turned out that no one at Whitsons had a full vision of where its products and processes started and ended, and there was no company-wide vision for the future.

That disconnect isn't uncommon in all kinds and sizes of companies. Often people don't have a common alignment for the future because they don't have a clear vision of the business end to end. Without that vision it's tough to know what you want or where you're going. Instead, it's business as usual to get by. That doesn't cut it in today's disrupt or be disrupted world.

Adding to the complexities, Whitsons is in food service delivery to schools and senior facilities and must deal with hypercomplex regulatory requirements and fiduciary responsibilities required with any system, says Whitcomb. Plus, he says, the company wanted to build things like nutritional components into their new system so someone didn't have to be a registered dietician to create a healthy menu.

Agility a Goal

The Whitsons team put together an incremental, purpose-driven approach that aimed for agility. Administrative, operational, and food production activities combined in one unified system that allowed them complete and real-time visibility of all their food service operations.

This time, instead of stitching together a bunch of independent systems that solved small problems in isolation, they committed to the platform mentality of establishing a digitally enabled ecosystem for business-critical functions of the catering model—the shopping mall platform concept (Figure 4.1).

Initially, this included purchase ordering, inventory tracking and distribution, food safety compliance checks, recipe and menu creation, and food preparation. Utilizing a platform approach meant each part could be built and integrated with each other and any existing legacy systems without being dependent on each other. Checks and balances were built into the system, too, to help free on-site managers from some of the tedious day-to-day monitoring that was required.

Once the infrastructure was in place, new locations, users, and changes could be rolled out across any part of any one of its facilities, without disrupting any other part of the ecosystem. And best of all, any future disruptions—including something as widespread as new nutrition requirements as happened in 2010—can be added smoothly and quickly.

As an aside, that initial digital platform and road map became a powerful digital strategy that gave birth to a disruptive idea/platform—Culinary Suite—for other companies. That platform digitizes and integrates the back- and front-end processes of the food management business. Backend processes include warehousing, purchasing, inventory, menus, recipes, and nutrition. Front-end processes include digital signage, menu ordering, payment, and delivery. Already, this platform-based experience has been used successfully by more than 100 other companies.

Operational Excellence

Whitsons grew from serving 78 school districts in 2010 to 125 in 2021.With the power of a business platform the company calls DineCentral, recipes are easily created and supported by real-time data on nutritional and allergen content and information on current inventory across locations. Once new meals are chosen, they're sent instantly to a menu management tool. The tool auto-tags menu items with nutritional icons that can be published instantly to a mobile ordering app that parents use to preorder their kids' meals.

With both horizontal and vertical processes integrated and supported by intelligent digital automation, Whitsons now has reclaimed the time that used to be lost on manual processes and can focus on innovating in its field, utilizing its workforce to its maximum potential, and, thus, creating a more fulfilled and empowered workforce.

Speed of Digital

The incremental transformation of Whitsons' core systems to digital took three years to roll out. But the subsequent mobile ordering platform that came next took just three months and was rolled out near-instantly across all their locations, with its popularity quickly growing thanks to the platform effect. Remember, that's when user numbers snowball as services increase and more users tap into the system.

This also shows the exponential rate of exploration and execution that can be attained once the key elements of the DOM become a central part of a business's culture. Not all manual operations were eliminated. Some price and other updates still are done manually but instead of having to be entered multiple times, it's once and then the changes are proliferated across the system.

To put the time savings in more perspective, Whitsons oversees approximately 800 physical locations with teams in every location. That translates to receiving and processing about 10,000 invoices a week. Handling that much data manually would be a tortuous and laborious process. The digital platform does it all automatically, quickly, and accurately.

Says Paul Whitcomb, “The digital journey has definitely been transformative in terms of the availability of and transparency of information and data. The DOM takes away the complexities and allows functionality that our competitors didn't have when we started. We have tighter financial control when it comes to managing inventories and planning, too.”

Such is the power of the digital operating model and its ability to deliver better experience.

Leading the Pack

Today the company is soundly at Level 4/digital maturity on its DOM journey and, if the momentum continues, it will move toward Level 5/market leaders. In a pandemic year of decline for some of the biggest names in the food service industry, Whitsons was named one of the Top 9 fastest-growing food management companies in 2021 by Food Management magazine, an industry publication. Additionally, it ranked number 16 on the group's Top 50 list, as well as number 6 in its K–12 group.²

That's a testament to the company's ability to adjust rapidly to supply chain disruption and restructuring, changes in menus, and constant fluctuation of school openings and demand. For example, to maintain its leading role in food service management for K–12 during the pandemic, the company used strategies like grab-and-go kiosks dispensing breakfast/lunch bundles, home delivery of meals, multiday breakfast/lunch meal packs for virtual learners and “Take & Bake” meals for weekends and holiday breaks.³

What's Ahead?

The company's future is about more and better—that's in terms of business platform (data, process, and experience) for its teams, its customers, and its customers' customers.

“Our data is unique,” says Whitcomb, because due to privacy and other issues, the company doesn't own or track its user data. The company does, however, have unidentifiable usage data, purchasing data, and production data available through the platform. Perhaps down the road Whitsons will determine how it can leverage that data to do more than deliver better experiences.

Build versus Buy versus Rent

In today's world and into the future, when a company puts together a digital ecosystem, it usually doesn't build everything from scratch. Rather, companies like Whitsons buy certain other platforms—often SaaS (software as a service on the Cloud)—that are readily available. Whitsons, for example, built its core Dine Central food management platform, but purchased already- built software platforms like meal ordering and digital signage.

With the power of the platform combined with API, all parts connect and work together smoothly as one ecosystem.

Innovation

Innovation at the company is up, and from the bottom up, too, from users of the system. All kinds of people offer new ideas and requests for new features on the platform. For the company, the challenge is to determine the best way to identify and implement the best ideas.

The impossible is possible, but in what order and when are the questions. Whitcomb points to the need to add more definition to the innovation process. “It's been such a backlog because we've never sought out innovation before. Now we need to work on innovation into the future.”

A Detailed Look at the DOM Journey

• COMPANY: Whitsons Culinary Group
• INDUSTRY: Food services provider to consumers and public and private organizations including schools, residential and healthcare dining, prepared meals, corporate dining, vending services, and emergency dining.
• HEADQUARTERS: Islandia, New York
• NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: approximately 3,000
• OBJECTIVES OF ASSESSMENT:

IT alignment with business

• Enhance the return on investment and value for money.
• Improve commitments to business needs based on priorities.
• Decrease dependencies on IT and improve turnaround time.

Project Portfolio Management

• Prioritize projects.
• Resource planning.
• Application rationalization.

IT Governance

• Establish governance team and encourage best practices.
• Enforce data quality compliance.

People and Processes

• Document business processes for the seven disciplines.
• Cross-discipline processes not consistently followed.
• Focused training.

RESULTS OF ASSESSMENT

Business Challenges:

• Business processes not well documented and the mapping between the workflow unknown.
• General communication challenges considering the distributed work environment.
• Adequate governance not in place for business processes.
• Multiple systems need to be updated manually via rekey, leading to less productivity.
• Contract management done manually and requires extensive follow-up with suppliers.
• Available business applications cumbersome; most business applications siloed with multiple data entry points.
• Manual aggregation of data leads to bottleneck that requires unit and district managers' time; school districts' personnel's time spent reconciling point of service data into current system.
• Budgeting process for schools cumbersome, time-consuming.

IT Challenges

• Most systems, including finance and ERP (employee resource planning), in silos, not integrated with other mainstream systems.
• Lack of necessary control over existing system and its inefficiencies among users leads to need for a viable alternative.
• Need to implement industry standard processes defined for architecture and design.
• Possibility to automate integration/interfaces and help reduce manual dependencies.
• IT governance process and project management practices need to be defined and put in place.
• Need to identify architectural and process opportunities to maximize the existing IT investment.
• Need plan to scale up using the existing investment in applications and systems.

IN SHORT:

AS IS… (the current situation)

Business…

• Ineffective communication.
• Business processes inefficient; lack of governance leads to inefficiencies.
• Contract management inadequate.
• Stock inventory inadequate and often leads to production halt.

Technology…

• Offline business reporting (multiple systems not talking to each other).
• Multiple rekey required; multiple applications do not sync data, making rekey mandatory.
• Data untrustworthy; not clean and lack of data definitions.

TO BE…(future resolutions)

Business…

• Implement unified communication system.
• Governance will define the business.

Technology…

• Implement custom solution to replace off-the-shelf system.
• Collapse business applications under one umbrella to enable entry once, multiple use.
• IT processes streamlined and standardized.
• Access unified data via the common interface.

RESULTING COST SAVINGS:

• Nearly $4 million over a five-year conversion plan with platform instead of licensing and servicing fees in previous system.
• Additional benefits:
  • Improved and more and better customer experience.
  • Improved and more and better employee experience.
  • Exponential growth.