Jollibee Foods Corporation (JFC), also known as the Jollibee Group, is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing restaurant companies with over 9,600 stores in 32 countries. With a mission to serve great-tasting food and bring the joy of eating to everyone, the Jollibee Group has grown organically and through acquisitions. They currently manage a total of 19 prominent brands.
A series of challenges motivated Jollibee Group to think out of the box and explore divergent ideas that inspired their innovative approach to digital transformation. Before we dive into how low-code enterprise orchestration enabled them to increase agility and foster innovation, let’s look into the challenges the team had to overcome.
Thinking beyond vendor-specific solutions
As they grew, Jollibee Group faced the challenge of dealing with outdated user interfaces in their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). They were primarily on SAP SRM, which was not user-friendly for their employees. They also grappled with user errors in defining workflows, and approvals that were not in sync with organizational changes. At the same time, making any changes to the existing system entailed expensive development and regression testing, which was not scalable.
Alongside SAP SRM, Jollibee Group’s technology team also needed to deal with the complexity of supporting 4 other ERP systems that were being used across their 18 brands. This in turn made it a challenge for employees who were being rotated across different brands to get a consistent experience.
Concurrently, the team needed to migrate away from SAP SRM, which was reaching its end of life in 2027. Doing any customization work in SAP SRM would have been a throwaway solution since the team would eventually migrate to another system.
The team needed a solution that was independent of the replacement system while ensuring that their stringent global approval process could be followed.
Reimagined procure-to-pay process
Instead of taking the conventional route of building yet another user-interface in a system nearing end of life, Jollibee Group partnered Workato, a low-code enterprise orchestration leader, to pioneer the adoption of a composable ERP architecture. This required integrating and automating end-to-end workflows to deliver a differentiated, easy-to-use experience for users across the business.
Jollibee Group tapped on Workato’s low-code capabilities to orchestrate and automate approval routing across their business, connecting solutions to meet their needs.
Shop-Pay is Jollibee Group’s visionary digital transformation initiative, designed to reimagine the Procure-to-Pay process by bringing SAP approval closer to the users through integration with Microsoft Teams.
Here’s how it works:
- A user requests a new shopping cart in SAP SRM
- Workato gets the shopping cart for approval
- Workato gets the nature of the shopping cart from SRM
- Workato identifies the appropriate approval matrix based on its record of Jollibee Group’s spend policy
- Workato retrieves approvers based Jollibee Group’s organizational hierarchy as defined in SAP SuccessFactors
- Workato Teams bot notifies approvers of shopping cart for their action and displays shopping cart details relevant for decision making
- The bot enables user to approve, reject, or add approvers in Microsoft Teams
- The bot then automatically pushes the fully approved requisition back to SAP SRM so that a Purchase Order can be created from that requisition
With a composable ERP architecture, Jollibee Group is no longer constrained by the limitations of the SAP interface. The technology team can continue being agile with their backend transformation to upgrade SAP while still innovating to meet business needs and improve the shopping cart approval experience, incorporating it to a tool they use everyday like Microsoft Teams.
Approval interface on SAP ported over to a mobile-friendly user interface
Significant efficiency gains, yet fully compliant
With Shop-Pay, Jollibee Group was able to:
- Realize an 88% increase in efficiency in managing shopping carts
- Ensure 100% adherence to approval limits and controls, by eliminating user errors
- Provide users across all brands a seamless and mobile-friendly user experience
- Remove dependency on the ERP backend
- Eliminate redundant encoding of approvers by integrating with HR organisational data
- Eliminate the need for costly customizations
The future of automation at Jollibee Group
Shop-Pay opens up possibilities for further automation across Jollibee Group. The team now has the opportunity to use the workflow engine that they built in different enterprise scenarios – access controls, invoice automation, managing franchisees and even enterprise project management and document approvals.
By challenging the status quo and leveraging modern low-code orchestration, Jollibee Group is not only improving internal efficiencies but is also setting a benchmark for innovation in the fast-food industry.
