Food distribution multinational Sysco CIDO: Our secret to growth is IT-centric

Tom Peck joined Sysco during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and his main goal at the time was to ensure that the world's largest food service delivery company could survive and help thousands of customers stay afloat.

The Houston-based multinational has been delivering food to sparsely populated buildings, cafeterias, airports and nursing homes across the United States with curbside check-in, contactless menus and menu QR codes Helping clients “reinvent” their businesses.

Peck, who joined Sysco in December 2020 as executive vice president and chief information and digital officer, said: "We have been one of the hardest-hit industries in the pandemic economy, and the pandemic has forced us to re-examine The entire enterprise and the entire industry."

He said that although the company had already embarked on a cloud journey when the epidemic broke out, for a food distributor, such a major event requires a deep understanding of strategic vision, research and development Plan and implement significant changes in digital transformation.

In 2020, Sysco appointed former CVS Health and CVS Pharmacy executive Kevin Hourican as CEO, a year later in May 2021, it announced a plan titled "Growth Secret” blueprint.

The plan is to apply B2C to Sysco’s B2B business and strive to achieve a 1.5 times growth in the scale of the entire industry - Peck said that the scale of this industry in the United States alone is expected to be as high as 330 billion US dollars.

He added: "It's not enough to survive the pandemic, we also need to transform ourselves... and grow faster than our competitors and our market. 'Growth secrets' and we operate The way we do business is closely related - the cloud and underlying technology, the way we deliver software, and all the underlying capabilities that underpin our strategy."

Sysco's key elements: IT

Peck said that from Essentially, the "recipe for growth" strategy "relies heavily on Sysco being a great technology company, getting rid of technical debt, moving to the cloud, offering microservices and using AI."

Sysco has been aggressively making acquisitions for years, but found itself burdened with many on-premises data centers and outdated applications. To modernize, companies must migrate and rewrite many cloud applications to increase efficiency, speed up production, and reduce technical debt. He insisted that Sysco is using and will continue to use services from all three major public cloud providers to support the scope of their business and the diversity of customer needs.

In addition to the cloud, another major component of Sysco’s strategy is a sophisticated local e-commerce system called Sysco Shop, which can apply B2C to Sysco’s global B2B business. Specifically for personalization and customization, Peck said the system is based on an analytics strategy that leverages the company's in-house developed data warehouse, Amperity customer data platform, Salesforce CRM, Tableau for sales analytics and generating user clickstream analytics. Tealium as the core.

Like most companies, Sysco has traditionally run its B2B e-commerce business on a bulk re-order basis, but leveraging the agility and flexibility of the cloud and delivering personalized microservices to each customer, This is very beneficial to their business.

Peck said: “We are now able to deliver in a more agile way and launch new features every two weeks that are more in line with consumer-level requirements.” "They have added analytics and e-commerce personalization tools to their portfolio (such as product recommendations, inventory management tools, curated menus and loyalty programs) to expand the value to business customers. We have noticed that shopping carts are getting larger, which It's because we've stepped up our upsells and cross-sells and provided referrals to our customers. It's this, combined with our investment and sales tools, that has driven substantial growth."

Adding AI to the IT Mix

Sysco’s programmers and data scientists use a range of tools, including JavaScript, Kafka and Python, to build the company’s self-developed e-commerce and data warehouse platform, which they have deployed in many distribution centers. Robotic process automation with Blue Prism.

Sysco is somewhere between a food supplier and a large customer. It uses SaaS platforms as much as possible, but the core technology stack is developed independently, and the IT team uses emerging tools such as AI on this basis. "The basic engines for e-commerce and data warehousing are custom coded, but we use the best solutions around the core for everything else," Peck said. Sysco's goal is to leverage Salesforce and Tealium's analytics capabilities, along with customer historical order data, continue to make personalized recommendations, provide more self-service tools, and provide more granular product portfolio recommendations through AI. Sysco is now using artificial intelligence to detect anomalies in purchasing behavior and predict customer intentions for new products.

Sysco has also been implementing machine learning to “develop smooth inventory forecasts by predicting customer behavior, inventory levels and pricing,” Peck said.

He said that integrating advanced AI into their highly robotic process automation workshops and edge computing is a huge opportunity the company is currently exploring. In addition, deploying large language models (LLM) will also allow Sysco to Use richer data in the cloud to plan their product catalog based on trends and discover changing buying behavior.

He pointed out: "The introduction of AI is a natural progression, and machine learning requires a lot of input content.". Whether in the cloud or on-premises, large language models allow you to ingest more data and scan more information. We may search for and obtain feedback on social trends about restaurants, recipes and food and report it back to us or our customers. ”

Catalytic Change

Peck said that despite the complexity of writing AI algorithms, the technology is the simplest part of Sysco’s next-generation growth recipe.

Implementing this, he said There are several challenges with such advanced technology, such as how to handle change management and how to scale quickly, but the benefits far outweigh the challenges.

To this end, Sysco is promoting to their sales team about eliminating the tedious work and tasks required. The benefits brought by it allow them to find new potential customers and grow their business.

Peck said that initiatives such as this are all about winning the hearts and minds of employees and getting them to accept AI to come up with more predictive solutions. Sales calls and order recommendations.

He said: "Your sales team may view AI as a threat, but in fact AI is not a threat, AI will allow them to spend less time on research and pricing instead spend more time on customer relationships and cultivating new business. ”

He believes that if implemented properly, AI can bring huge benefits to all employees and the company as a whole.

“AI helps us serve customers better and achieve accurate fill rates Having trucks show up on time helps our company focus, and sometimes companies that want to digitally transform tend to be too broad and try to cover everything. And we're very focused on the key things we're trying to do, which is a morale booster for the company and makes us feel like we're part of something special. ”

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