Americana Restaurants automates critical business processes with Oracle Cloud

If you live in or are visiting the Middle East and North Africa region and experience a craving for food from iconic global brands, Americana Restaurants is the place to go. The company operates over 2,100 franchise restaurants in 12 countries, representing famous brands such as Krispy Kreme, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Over the last 20 years, Americana Restaurants relied on bespoke ERP applications hosted on-premises with an Oracle database. Rapid growth strained this infrastructure, exposing limitations in its ability to scale to demand and support innovative technologies. Americana Restaurants sought to address these challenges by consolidating its disparate on-premises ERP environments to a single cloud solution. As that strategy evolved, IT staff were challenged to extend business processes across multinational operations. With the company’s legacy systems, approval mechanisms were manual, employing paper-based or via email interactions which resulted in delays and gaps in information. Any changes to business processes required manual intervention by technical staff, including adjustments to any integrations impacted by the modifications.

Consequently, Americana Restaurants evaluated solutions for adopting a low-code scalable BPM solution that would offer robust capabilities, be easy to use, enable automation of establishing complex integrations, and support both desktop and mobile deployments.

Americana evaluated multiple key BPM players, including Oracle, by issuing a request for proposal associated with their digital transformation initiative known internally as Project Falcon. This process identified key differentiating factors that established Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s (OCI) capabilities as the best option to deliver a single cloud-based solution across the company’s requirements, including OCI Process Automation, Visual Builder, and Application Integration (OIC). OCI’s scalability and elasticity would help Americana lower its costs for supporting BPM standardization and the related integrations. Based on these capabilities, reinforced by the quality of a long-term working relationship with Oracle, Americana Restaurants selected OCI as the BPM solution best suited to its requirements.

OCI Process Automation provides Americana Restaurants with a no-code, user-friendly tool that lets administrators and master users easily create and modify workloads with drag-and-drop components and prebuilt process flows.

Americana Restaurants used OCI to design, automate, and integrate over 160 business processes spanning finance, human resources, supply chain, and marketing activities in less than six months. Process stakeholders take advantage of Oracle Content Management capabilities for the complete digitalization of document-centric workflows. OCI Process Automation provided a no-code, user-friendly tool for creating workflows by employing drag-and-drop components or by drawing from a library of pre-built processes. Administrators and master users could adjust workflows using OCI Process Automation without the involvement of technical staff.

The language and structure used to define Americana Restaurants’ processes were standardized, which provided clarity to all stakeholders to expedite desired outcomes. Multiple stakeholders and approvers can be involved in the process based on territory and dollar limits. Users enjoyed an intuitive user interface that requires minimal training across both desktop and mobile devices.

All approved stakeholders benefited from having each process clearly defined within the system, tracking activities along their processes and workflows while receiving alerts and reminders as appropriate. Documents relative to workflows were automatically tracked and archived, with all changes and feedback captured for future reference.

Overall, establishing a state-of-the-art BPM framework on OCI gave Americana Restaurants complete transparency and visibility into processes while also reducing process turnaround time. Users enjoyed end-to-end workflow monitoring, increased user accountability, centralized content management, and unified integration across all relevant systems. And costs were optimized because OCI scales up and down according to demand, while Americana Restaurants pays only for the OCI resources consumed.