The Franchise World Finally Gets the Whole 'Big Data' Thing
When you were ordering pizza in the late ’80s or early ’90s, you probably didn’t realize that you had reached new levels of technological sophistication. Yes, you were contributing to the early stages of the Domino’s Pizza data-collection empire. At that time, the company was gathering whatever customer information it could get: ZIP codes, order frequency, delivery times and anything else that could be gleaned from the door slips generated from deliveries. Back then, Domino’s used simple databases to crunch the numbers and try to figure out who its customers were, what they wanted and how to keep them calling for more.
Thirty years later, the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based pizza franchise is still gathering information, though on a much bigger scale. “What kind of data do we collect? Everything we can get our hands on,” says Domino’s chief information officer Kevin Vasconi. “That’s not hype. Even if we don’t immediately know exactly how to use the data, we do know we have some really smart data scientists. If we start looking at data we’ve never looked at before, some insight will
