Raising Cane's began as a chicken finger quick service restaurant with a single location on campus at Louisiana State University. Today, almost 25 years later, the chain supports 700 restaurants with 50,000 employees across 33 states.
To scale systems and software, Raising Cane's looked toward its vendors for support and guidance, Vincent Severns, SVP of IT at Raising Cane’s, said Tuesday during the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2022, in Orlando, Florida.
With over 140 integrations and expansion into other states, each with different regulations and labor laws, the restaurant was looking to streamline their services and increase efficiency and visibility of everyday operations within the restaurant.
Turning to enterprise management cloud-based software company Workday, Raising Cane's was able to customize, tweak processes and roll out HR services, from benefits to payroll.
“Like most organizations, a lot of our stuff was on Excel, paper or Word documents, but the systems we did have, we started to see them actually start to break in the weirdest ways,” said Severns.
One example of this was the accounting system they were using had a life insurance tax calculator that could only hold up to 32,000 people. For a while the system worked, but eventually it stopped, leaving the company to search for alternatives.
“So I guess that was about 2014 or 2015, somewhere in there, when we started to really run into some of those obstacles,” Severns said. “And then that’s when the realization was we need to do something different here, we need to get a true enterprise-class system in place that will help us grow as a business.”
Since tapping Workday, the restaurant has started to venture into piloting and adopting other technologies. During the pandemic, the company built and launched a mobile app for customers.
The mobile app used geolocation technology and kept mobile app orders in a queue until the customer hit a certain mileage near the store. This let employees prioritize orders and kept the food hot and fresh for customers.
More recently, the company has piloted drone delivery technology through Flytrex, a drone delivery service company.
While the company hasn’t been advertising the service, it has gotten good feedback from customers and is looking to start adding signage around stores where the option is available. If the positive feedback continues, Raising Cane’s is looking to integrate the service in its own mobile app, according to Severns.
