Scaling Data Engineering: A Google Cloud Platform Case Study for Craveable Brands

“Sakura Sky delivered on time and within budget a Google Cloud Platform architecture that could meet our current and future needs.”

Ken Russell, Group Head of Digital Marketing, Craveable Brands

Craveable Brands is the franchisor for more than 570 quick-service restaurants across Red Rooster, Oporto, and Chicken Treat. The combined network employs around 12,500 people and serves more than 150,000 customers every day. Sakura Sky’s Data practice was the strategic partner for Craveable’s move to Google Cloud Platform, running the project from proof of concept to production and delivering the data engineering platform that now unifies operations across the group. The work was featured as an official Google Cloud Platform case study at the time.

The Challenge

Craveable’s operational data lived in legacy silos: point-of-sale, loyalty, marketing, supply chain, and franchisee reporting all separated by system boundaries that prevented unified analysis. Customer relationship management and loyalty programs alone covered the details of around 500,000 people, but the marketing and analytics teams could not get at that data fast enough to act on it. To run the group at scale, the team needed real-time business insight across every brand and every outlet, on a foundation built to grow with the network.

In parallel, the business wanted to modernise the in-store experience. Static, printed menus that had to be shipped out to individual restaurants were being replaced by digital menu boards that could be updated centrally on the fly. That programme, delivered with content management partner StratosMedia on Chrome devices, also needed a cloud platform that could handle dynamic content distribution at scale without surprises in the bill.

The Engineering

We designed and implemented a unified data engineering platform on Google Cloud, named here by the services we actually used so engineering readers can map the pattern to their own environments:

• Reliable ingestion and scheduling with Cloud Pub/Sub, Compute Engine, and App Engine, orchestrating a high-throughput layer that pulled from every operational system on a defined cadence with automated scaling under load.
• Stream and batch processing in one place with Cloud Dataflow for automated and scalable data ingestion, and Cloud Dataprep (by Trifacta) for extract, transform, and load work, so reporting and operational analytics shared the same transformation logic.
• A central warehouse for the whole group in BigQuery, unifying data from every brand and outlet into a single queryable surface for analytics teams.
• Business intelligence and analyst-friendly exploration through Google Data Studio for executive dashboards and Cloud Datalab for analyst-driven collaboration on the warehouse, so business stakeholders and data teams worked from the same source of truth.
• Cost-effective archival in Cloud Storage, which acted as the static-file repository for raw data backups and the recovery point Craveable’s compliance posture required.

Alongside the data platform, the StratosMedia content management solution running on Google Cloud Platform delivered the dynamic digital menu boards via Chrome devices in-store. Devices link to brands, locations, and menu sets so the right content reaches the right outlet, and a hybrid-playback model keeps the boards running on previously distributed content if connectivity drops. Craveable can update pricing, promotions, and product mix on every screen in the network from a central console.

The Result

Moving to Google Cloud Platform cut Craveable’s data costs by 75% while opening up the scale and engineering depth they needed to keep growing. Queries that mattered to the business ran roughly twice as fast as on the previous cloud environment, which meant decision-making data could be put in front of marketing and operations teams faster, and access to that data could be extended to more team members across the group. The combination of dynamic digital menu boards in-store and a centralised data platform behind the scenes gave Craveable’s marketing and operations teams the velocity to act on what the network was telling them.

“If you provide your marketing directors with a solution that’s fast and produces results, they’ll use it more and more. Google Cloud Platform has enabled us to do this while enhancing our customer relationship management and loyalty systems.”

Ken Russell, Group Head of Digital Marketing, Craveable Brands

If you are looking to consolidate fragmented operational data across a multi-brand or multi-site business, contact us to scope an engagement with our Data practice.