IT in 3: Pizza Hut focuses on mobile, analytics
Pizza Hut technology efforts have recently focused on mobile ordering, which has helped drive incremental sales gains, but the chain’s chief information and digital officer Baron Concors is also focusing on analytics and utilizing "big data."
Concors joined Plano, Texas-based Pizza Hut Inc. in late 2008, after serving as vice president of global retail technology for FedEx Corp. and as a management consultant for Deloitte & Touche and Ernst & Young. As he joined Pizza Hut, the pizza segment was foodservice’s ground zero in the battle for market share of online and mobile order sales. Each of the Big 3 – Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza and Papa John’s Pizza – in recent years has reported significant incremental growth in that business compared with other order channels, such as walk-in requests and telephone calls.
Concors recently spoke with Nation’s Restaurant News about IT initiatives at Yum! Brands Inc.-owned Pizza Hut, which is the global and domestic pizza leader in terms of units, with nearly 13,000 restaurants worldwide, including about 7,200 locations in the United States.