It made its mark with Chili Crabs and premium seafood, but navigating unpredictable pandemic challenges calls for non-culinary digitalization expertise
In the good old days before the COVID-19 pandemic, tourists flocked to Singapore to savor the homegrown dish called Chili Crab or Black Pepper Crab.
Fast forward to now, the island’s food and beverage industry has undergone multiple waves of pandemic control measures that have left high-end restaurant businesses in difficult financial straits.
One restaurant chain synonymous with the iconic seafood, JUMBO Group of Restaurants Pte Ltd, has announced this week its answer to remaining resilient amid the need to keep customers safe: scaling up digital transformation to manage its more-than-35 outlets across Singapore, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and other parts of Southeast Asia.
The chain’s vision is to create a cross-border integrated system within the entire organization and its key stakeholders’ ecosystem. According to its Executive Director and Group CEO Ang Kiam Meng: “Food is very much at the heart of people across all cultures and geographies… it is crucial for us to leverage technology to remain competitive from the internal efficiency and cost perspective, and to utilize data to help us innovate and adapt to the fast-changing operating landscape and taste buds of consumers in Singapore and across the region.”
Uplifting efficiency, resilience
Building the chain’s enterprise resource planning core by SAP, Jumbo will bolster the system with other digital solutions by the firm.
The added solutions will allow the business to standardize data and support end-to-end efficiency while being data-driven to gain relevant insights for decision making to improve bottom lines. The increased digital capabilities can also benefit broader business objectives, including uplifting human capital competency via the removal of paper and manual processes; boosting business agility via predictive analytics; and streamlining the business for resilience and future-proofing against future crises.
The new digitalization efforts will be expanded across the chain’s regional operations to optimize procurement strategies and sharpen sales and service efforts. Other cutting-edge technologies such as IoT, AI and CX solutions are expected to improve Central Kitchen operations and customer service levels at its outlets.
According to SAP Singapore’s Managing Director, Eileen Chua: “F&B operators like JUMBO accelerate their digital transformation efforts to be an intelligent enterprise and implement a scalable digital core that will lay the foundation for operational excellence, a single source of truth, business analytics for real-time decision making and a platform for innovation and collaboration.”
JUMBO’s Ang added that the scaled-up DX will “enhance our operational capabilities and unearth deeper insights into our business operations” to conceptualize new dining experiences, concepts and menus, all of which will be “crucial in future growth and internationalization plans.”
