Scaling at speed

Businesses often have a limited window of opportunity to drive strong growth and when they see it, they’re too often held back by a limited management structure. Scalable technology with built-in best practices can allow for rapid expansion without losing sight of what makes a company successful in the first place. This is particularly true for a young company launching itself into one of the world’s most crowded and competitive markets, it can’t afford drop the ball.

These factors are why MOD Pizza, 2015’s fastest-growing restaurant chain in the U.S., is rolling out SAP S/4HANA Cloud across every single one of its 200 (and growing) restaurants.

MOD Pizza specialises in serving customers artisan-style food made on demand. The company believes strongly in a purpose-led culture that’s committed to being a force for good in the community. In the year since it opened its first UK location, MOD Pizza has spread to Nottingham, Newcastle, Brighton and now Leicester Square. But to power their continued growth, MOD Pizza needs more than great food and happy customers. They need a solution that scales, with built-in best practices – especially best practices around regulatory compliance in a market they’ve only moved into 18 months ago.

The technology powering business growth goes beyond ERP. Employee headcount is added with each new store, and for a company that already has 1,700 employees, Human Capital Management is critical to success. MOD Pizza uses SuccessFactors, which is seamlessly intergrated into the company’s HCM strategy. Not only is the company hiring from among the best, they are providing employees with the tools to succeed on the job — which enhances growth through improved productivity and employee engagement.

Tara Gambill, Senior Program Manager IT and Director of SAP Center of Excellence, has been a lead on the project where she has seen the benefits of SAP’s business standard with best practices. In particular, MOD Pizza’s experience is a testament to the importance of change management for fast adoption of a public cloud with a fit-to-standard process. “Key lessons learned and challenges for our project stem from change management. It touches every component of the project. Going into a public cloud project with a ‘fit to standard’ process means you have to have your mindset ready to walk through that and understand how we’re going to move through this process, how we’re going to manage all the things that don’t necessarily fit, and how to start small but think big.”

And because SAP S/4HANA Cloud’s Quarterly updates provide access to the latest digital advances, MOD Pizza is continually seeing the best of what the cloud software has to offer. This provides an opportunity for leadership to regularly communicate on processes to rationalize what they’re doing and, sometimes why they will benefit from change. As Gambill says, “We can continue to evolve this. It’s not an event, it’s more of a process.”

Compliance is important for every business, and never more so than for a fast-growing business in a new market, but  business leadership also needs real-time insight into the state of the company, and the tools to act instantly on the resulting information. S/4HANA Cloud’s real-time architecture and end-to-end ecosystem ensure that decision-makers always have access to current, accurate information, which drives confidence in their decisions.

Every organization can learn from MOD Pizza’s experience — even those who aren’t currently growing by leaps and bounds. Every organization faces the choice to either be the disruptor or be disrupted. How will you know when you can’t wait any longer to adopt a platform that gives you a true digital edge? How can you have the confidence to expand to an international market without in-depth knowledge of local regulation? No matter what your situation, every business today needs a platform that provides instant access to innovation, fast time-to-value, and the heritage of unique and global industry expertise.