Kenny Thein joined fast food company Restaurant Brands in 2019, just prior to Covid and helped the organisation mature and operate digitally at scale during turbulent and uncertain times.

One of the key deliverables during this time was the introduction of scalable commerce platforms for KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and delivering them at speed, safely into stores.

In the last financial year, the company recorded its biggest sales year of $1.1bn. Restaurant Brands has more than 11,000 staff and more than 350 owned restaurants and 104 franchised outlets. It serves 54 million customers, in four divisions globally, under four brands KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell & Carl’s Jr.

During that time, the New Zealand part of the business contributed over $460 million in sales to the group.

In New Zealand Kenny has a multi-disciplined technology team, of platform managers, PMO, store technology specialist, and the service desk for all of Restaurant Brands’ local stores. He also is responsible for the cyber security, infrastructure and data and analytics functions. This team services all technology related to the New Zealand business and provides some global services.

“We can’t do everything ourselves, so building trusted strategic partnerships in key verticals is critical to scale quickly,” says Thein.

“Our technology team’s philosophy is thinking like a start-up, while operating like an enterprise. We create lightweight ‘just enough’ experiments with core scalable processes, systems, and infrastructure in mind. If successful, we can quickly roll-out, expand and productionise into our business, if not, we can remove and revise at a much lower impact to the business. We build/buy loosely coupled, scalable platforms that can replaced easily, for future proofing and to meet the ever-changing technology landscape,” he adds.

Huge growth in e-commerce sales

With the introduction of commerce and the aggregator integration platforms the company saw e-commerce sales grow over 10% from 2019, which translated to tens of millions of dollars in sales for KFC alone, according to Thein,

Thein and the team run a fleet of POS, drive throughs, digital menu boards, aggregator channels of Uber Eats/Menulog/DeliveryEasy/ DoorDash, kiosks, ecommerce web and native apps, all common payment methods and contactless Eftpos, QR codes to drive access and interact with various information and platforms.

“This has allowed the business to operate under any Covid restrictions,” says Thein. “For example, no dine-in, contactless drive through, contactless pickup and delivery, social distancing in stores. The combination of technology at store and in the business permits our stores to adapt, meet and exceed any government mandates. All while ensuring our people are safe, customers are aware of availability and can connect with us securely across all our channels, brands and stores.”

With scalable and stable and flexible commerce platforms the team was able to integrate various ecommerce and aggregator platforms into the POS systems across all stores and brands. 

“This innovation increased confidence in the technology to support the business needs and opened new order channels to service our customers,”  he adds.

With a flexible aggregator platform, the team could test offers and products quickly and obtain findings to be able to merge back into the main menu.

“Our aggregator platform is POS and provider agnostic which means we integrate once and can use across multiple brands with minor modifications. This gives a reliable platform to enter the market at speed, scale and securely,” says Thein.