Restaurant Brands International Inc. (“RBI”) is one of the largest quick service restaurant companies in the world, comprised of three of the most prominent and iconic quick service restaurant brands including BURGER KING®, TIM HORTONS®, and POPEYES®
$30 billion+ in system-wide sales | 25,000+ restaurants | 100+ countries and U.S. territories
CMX began working with Burger King’s Global Quality team in 2014. The challenges they were facing are common for fast growing brands wanting to achieve and maintain Quality and Operational Excellence in today’s complex operating environment. Those challenges include:
- Numerous legacy systems that were inflexible and siloed
- Too many manual, time consuming processes
- Lack of transparency and quality of data
- Maintaining quality and consistency as the business scaled
- The need for standardization yet flexibility across regions and countries
Burger King’s Supplier Performance Enterprise Quality (SPEQ) solution was launched in late 2014. As RBI has since expanded, the Tim Hortons and Popeyes brands have been added to the platform.
Today the CMX1 Platform is used to manages all of RBI’s supply chain and product quality, risk, and compliance management programs across all three brands. The solution is used in more than 100+ countries and U.S. territories and covers 25,000+ restaurants.
“CMX has been a tremendous partner to work with. Our operating environment is incredibly complex; we’re a global brand with locations around the world, our menu is diverse, and we source from thousands of suppliers. It’s a tough problem to tackle and CMX was the right choice for us. With their platform, Burger King, Tim Hortons, and Popeyes have continued to aggressively scale, while maintaining control and oversight over supplier and product quality.”
Diego Beamonte, Head of Quality Assurance for Restaurant Brands International
RBI’s Supplier Performance Enterprise Quality (SPEQ) solution leverages the CMX1 platform in the following ways:
CMX1 provides a single source to manage and store all of RBI’s Suppliers, Distributors, 3rd Party Labs and Auditing partner’s information. This includes their corporate offices, facility/locations, contacts, data, and related documents. Change Management controls allow for partners to initiate information updates, and regional approvers at RBI to review and accept those changes. These controls ensure integrity and completeness of partner data.
The Global Quality team uses CMX1 to manage all their finished product and raw material specifications, formulations and common ingredients for their extensive and varied menu worldwide across all three brands. Utilizing an authoring, review and approval workflow, the team is able to collaborate across regions, departments, and with suppliers to create data-driven specifications. Specifications are created utilizing intelligent forms that can include header information, product formulations, processing control points, packaging, storage and shelf life requirements. Revision and Variation capabilities allow RBI to manage and track specification changes over time and keep impacted suppliers informed of updates.
CMX1 is utilized to coordinate the onboarding and approval process for adding new suppliers and facilities and approving those partners to produce specific menu item ingredients for export to a particular country. Business rules ensure that regional and country specific requirements for legal documents, supplier qualifications, nutrition and allergens, and product packaging and labeling are accounted for. Distributors are also onboarded in a similar manner.
Partners interact with the system to provide information and documentation during the evaluation and approval process. Product category and sub-category specific requirements dictate the collection of facility audits, graphics for labeling and packaging, nutritional values, certifications, allergen declarations, and the identification of tier 2 suppliers.
Workflow automation automatically assigns tasks to regional and departmental Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), who are responsible for reviewing and approving information and documents submitted during each step of the process.
RBI also leverages the CMX1 platform to manage ongoing partner performance and product quality and compliance leveraging the following modules:
Through the use of CMX1’s Application Programming Interface’s (API’s), RBI’s 3rd Party Auditing partners are able to report initial approval and annual Facility Audits through XML Data Feeds. The feeds are automatically processed each night and mapped to the appropriate facility to ensure ongoing compliance. The feeds include a .pdf copy of the original audit along with detailed audit results, questions, observations, findings for reporting purposes.
RBI’s 3rd Party Lab partners also have access to the platform. This enables them to access the product specifications which include the finished product standards, processing control points and test methods they are responsible for testing on a regular basis. Labs are able to upload results, giving RBI continuous insight and status on product quality and compliance.
Additionally, CMX1 automates the calculation of nutritional values and declarations for allergens for ingredients produced by one or more approved facilities. These values are further aggregated when combined into menu items for each brand by country. The module utilizes business rules for country specific rounding rules and allergen statements where cross-contamination may be present based on differences in supplier facilities and cooking equipment used in restaurants. This information is calculated and kept up-to-date in real-time and published for marketing and communication purposes each month.
RBI also leverages CMX1’s comprehensive Incident Management module for addressing product-related incidents reported by restaurants. These can range from delivery issues, to quality, to incidents involving guests. The module provides collaboration and resolution tools for restaurant managers, Distributors, Suppliers, 3rd Party Labs, and RBI’s Quality Assurance Team to address and resolve incidents. The solution provides for coordinating credits and replacements, guest communications and automated record keeping for compliance and reporting purposes.
The CMX1 platform provides a number of standard business reports with advanced options for searching, sorting and filtering data. Additional capabilities include data visualization and the creation and embedding of dashboards and reports via integration with Tableau’s analytics and data visualization platform.
"A great example of how CMX1’s architecture and data model supports the mission of our customers is Restaurant Brands International. Beyond the day-to-day management of suppliers and products, RBI has invested in and gained tremendous value from our Tableau integration. We never imagined RBI’s business stakeholders would be building, embedding, and sharing reports to the extent that they have. In one recent example, RBI used both reported incident data from restaurants, and distributor delivery and pricing data to identify product/delivery issues with the most severe financial impact in order to determine what partners and areas needed the most QA focus. Without our advanced analytics, these sorts of insights would not be possible."
Chris Rice, EVP Operations for CMX
The CMX team also worked closely with RBI to implement tailored Supplier, Distributor and Regional Scorecards utilizing a combination of the native reporting tools available in the CMX1 platform and also from Tableau’s analytics and data visualization platform. The scorecards are weighted based on region and supplier type and factor in facility volume and performance in the areas of Audits, Incidents, and Product Tests. The scorecards are automatically run each month providing direct feedback to vendors on their performance, and trending and comparative analysis for RBI by supplier type and region.
The implementation of CMX1 has had a significant impact on RBI’s ability to manage and monitor supply chain quality, risk and compliance as their business continues to grow rapidly.
The primary benefits include:
- The integration of all the different Supplier, Product and Quality Assurance processes and information into a single system has provided faster and easier access for all stakeholders to critical information and oversight of supply chain risk and compliance.
- CMX1 provides advanced process control and task management in the areas of Supplier Onboarding, Specification Management, Nutritional calculations and allergen declarations, Incident Management, and the reporting of Facility Audits and Product Tests by 3rd Party partners.
- The platform is adaptable to the growing complexities of today’s worldwide supply chain accounting for regional and country specific requirements.
