Darden Puts Frame Relay And Customized Apps On MenuDarden Puts Frame Relay And Customized Apps On Menu

Darden Restaurants Inc., parent company of the Bahama Breeze, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and Smoky Bones dining chains, wants to beat competitors to the table with a four-star IT infrastructure. Restaurant chains commonly have hundreds of locations, each hosting their own back-office systems, contributing to delays in integrating and distributing data. But by year's end, Darden will deploy a frame relay network and centralized, Web-enabled applications as part of an $8 million technology upgrade it began last year.

DOS-based back-office systems located in the company's 1,100 outlets nationwide will be replaced by accounts-payable, fixed-asset, purchase-order, inventory, and project-management modules from Oracle and human-resources software from PeopleSoft Inc., all running at Darden's Orlando, Fla., headquarters. Darden is also partnering with AT&T, IBM, and NCR to link its restaurants to a centralized MicroStrategy Inc. data warehouse in Orlando via a frame relay network with a guaranteed 64-Kbps connection speed. "We tried some virtual private network connections, and we looked at DSL and satellite, but frame was the most reliable," says Will Anguish, VP of corporate systems.

When the upgrade is complete, store managers will have easy access to financial information and company data on guest satisfaction, food quality, and employee retention. Previously, managers had to search through stacks of paper reports to find out how their stores rated in those areas compared with others. The new infrastructure will also cut credit-card processing time to just 2 seconds, down from as long as a minute during peak times.

Darden is moving forward with other IT initiatives, including a Lotus Notes application that will efficiently track restaurant construction projects and a customer-relationship-management implementation. The restaurant industry may have been slower than some to grasp IT's impact on the business, but Anguish says Darden realizes the benefits. "As a company," he says, "we've decided we can gain a competitive edge from technology."