2021 Business Impact Award Nomination: Aramark: Enterprise-wide data platform - Marko

[dmiller]

Describe your business and technical use case(s) and the challenges the business had:

The data was difficult to access with pockets of data buried in silos across its different business segments. Stakeholders from different business units, such as concessions, educational institutions, business dining, Healthcare and Facilities, lacked the confidence to make business decisions due to missing, duplication, and wrong data.

Furthermore, employees needed to increase their productivity and customer service during service periods and various points of service. As a result, they needed an automated way to process customer transactions, know the customers’ historical purchases in order to improve customer engagement and maximize the customer lifetime value.

However, Aramark had many legacy technologies that prevented the technical and data teams from supporting business initiatives, which often required hand-coded integrations.

Describe your strategy and execution to solve the business challenge. Include details on how SnapLogic played a role in the strategy and execution, including Snaps and other SnapLogic products/features:

In order to support business stakeholders to obtain the data they needed in real-time. The Data team took on the initiative of building an AI/ML algorithm embedded data platform. This data platform would ingest data from internal and external data sources, including Microsoft Azure, Twilio, IoT Telemetry, Salesforce, 2,500+ point-of-sales (POS), weather data and more.

Due to their legacy integration solution’s limitations and incompatibility to newer technologies, the data team chose SnapLogic as their integration platform - the foundation for their data platform - Marko. In using SnapLogic, they connected all internal and external data into a data platform Marko, and then AI/ML algorithms would be improved as more data is ingested. Real-time data streaming into Marko was powered with SnapLogic’s Ultra Pipelines so that business stakeholders had access to real-time data.

Additionally, Marko also serves as a collection of microservices including analytics, natural language, machine learning, visualization, and data-as-a-service. With Marko, not only can business stakeholders access data for business intelligence and reporting but developers have also built business applications on top of Marko.

Examples of business applications that were productized are keyMarkers, Prima, Enable and AIWX IoT:

• Real-time Revenue transparency: Transactions, Sales and Labor Productivity which also included Product Ranking capabilities
• Mobile enablement: Replacing paper forms to free up front and back of house tasks while reducing paper cost
• Improved Safety Compliance: Automation of temperature collection and training compliance
• POS anomaly alerts: Looking for transaction anomalies that need manager attention
• Occupancy, Traffic and Feedback: IoT telemetry captures traffic to enhance Food Production accuracy while also receiving real-time satisfaction or service alerts in our Smart Spaces

Who was and how were they involved in building out the solution? (Please include the # FTEs, any partners or SnapLogic professional services who were involved on the implementation)

SnapLogic was first deployed by 10 FTEs (developers and data engineers)

What were the business results after executing the strategy?

The data platform, named Marko, built on top of SnapLogic, enabled various business units to mobilize, mine, and share operational, transactional, and analytics data while enriching data with AI and ML algorithms to develop data trends w/o sifting through millions rows of data.

The Marko data-as-service surpassed 100m transactions this year across multiple domains and applications and Clients.

• Operations optimization that resulted in freeing our operators to spend more time servicing our customers and less time on non-value added tasks
• Simplified and increased the speed of delivery to stakeholders to get the data they need for analytics and reporting from weeks to minutes
• Stakeholders can make better business judgments and predict outcomes of future events with data from on-premises and cloud apps, 2,500+ point-of-sales (POS) data, and external sources like geolocation and Covid-19 data
• Automate IoT systems for our Facilities Services business, by creating Smart restrooms and meeting areas
• Simplified integrations across the enterprise and with Client applications with speed and agility
• Streamlined our Covid-19 Attestation and Vaccine compliance for our return to the office process