AWRG takes a slice out of energy consumption at their Pizza Hut restaurants


A food service company digitally transformed operations at their pizza restaurant chain
The Client
A large food service company deployed our enterprise-wide IoT and analytics program to save and sustain savings, across hundreds of restaurants of a pizza delivery chain.
Being the master franchisee of the global pizza chain in India, the client aimed to improve energy efficiency, food safety, equipment performance, and customer experience in the restaurants.
The Challenge
The food service company intended to improve monitoring and optimize its operations across all restaurants. Restaurants are highly energy-intensive, and rising energy and labor costs pose further challenges. Costs are challenging to control because of the small size of these restaurants and because they are spread across an extremely large geographic expanse. The energy demand created through heating, cooling, lighting, the cost of sanitation and the utilities required to run cooking equipment, contributed significantly to the energy spend. This high energy spend made up for a significant portion of the company’s operating expenses. In an effort to minimize its energy wastage and reduce operational costs, without hampering the occupant comfort, the client decided to implement EcoEnergy Insights’ Connected Restaurant Program.
The Solution
EcoEnergy Insights deployed the Connected Restaurant Program across 400 restaurants in India. The program utilized the CORTIX™ building IoT platform to identify opportunities to improve operations and reduce costs, thereby conserving energy. EcoEnergy Insights liaised with the client’s technical team to understand the store equipment through data. Data was collected on restaurant equipment like HVAC, lighting, walk-in-chiller (WIC), makeline, other infrastructure (laptops, computers, printers, ovens, geysers, etc.) and other miscellaneous equipment.
This vast amount of data from each restaurant's equipment including sensors, controllers, energy meters and systems at the stores was fed to the CORTIX platform. Upon complete integration, the platform was processing over 21 million data records per day from over 14 thousand unique data points. The platform provided actionable insights on three aspects of the restaurants’ equipment performance - health, availability, and efficiency.
Restaurant managers were proactively supported by our 24/7 BluEdge™ Command Center to manage their operations and equipment. Our BluEdge™ Command Center is a team of data scientists and domain experts who collate and interpret the insights from the CORTIX platform, identify further trends and requisite interventions, define action plans and ensure their completion in a timely manner. The team discovered energy wastage scenarios and then prepared restaurant-specific energy-saving strategies and energy conservation measures. They ensured that the predictive insights were deployed to proactively intervene before any issues arose. A bulk of issues were resolved remotely. These actionable intelligent insights were also made available to the client’s Operations team through an easy-to-use intuitive dashboard.
EcoEnergy Insights also used its Service Window® framework to understand the correlation between energy consumption and operation patterns. Since the start of this 5-year engagement, this patented framework was used to provide benefits that were immediate, impactful and lasting.
The Result
This 5-year services program focused on uncovering savings opportunities as well as sustaining the savings. Focusing on areas such as Efficiency, Guest Comfort, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) Deviation Management, Policy Compliances, Proactive Detections, Equipment Lifecycle Enhancement, and Food Safety was crucial in delivering value for a number of years.
- An average of 6.49% in energy was saved across the entire connected restaurant network.
- On average, over USD 700 was saved per restaurant, per year. This led to an overall energy saving of over USD 1.3 million for the client over 5 years of our engagement.
- 37% guest comfort compliance improvement was observed in the dining area.
- 20% food storage compliance improvement was observed in the walk-in-chiller.
- 19% food storage compliance improvement was observed in the makeline.
In addition, this engagement increased the equipment uptime by enabling operations and maintenance teams to proactively manage equipment performance, reduce downtime, and reduce man-hours spent on diagnosis and reporting. The intelligence on Diesel Generator sizing led to reduced operational expenses of captive generation for upcoming restaurants. The team also detected security breaches by analysis of operations. This provided immense value to this food service company.
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