Outsourcing: The Brinker Experience Robert Hess Director of Software Services

Agenda Who is Brinker? What are the IT Challenges? Why outsource? The Brinker experience…

Who Is Brinker? First Chili’s built in 1975 Chili’s Inc. was purchased by Norman Brinker in 1983 Renamed to Brinker International in 1991 Annual sales – $3 billion Currently we have 1100 restaurants In 47 states In 20 countries Annual growth rate of 15%

Who Is Brinker?

Who Is Brinker? Fortune Magazine honored Brinker as one of “America’s Most Admired Companies,” ranking Brinker the number one company in the entire food service industry in management quality, employee talent, product quality and innovation.

IT Challenges Operations focused company – Very dynamic business Multiple Concepts / Different Business Models Corporate and Franchise Needs Store Environments 800+ individual networks Point of Sale Environments Recent WAN implementation Critical business data distributed in 800+ locations

IT Challenges IT strategy How do we “keep the wheels on” the current systems and migrate the systems to future technology solutions? What are the specific skill set gaps? Where do I find / how can I afford the talent needed? How do I know how many people I need?

Why Outsource? Clear backlog of maintenance requests Release resources for focusing on strategic initiatives Achieve cost savings without compromising on service levels Achieve flexibility in staffing – quick ramp-up / ramp-down Improve time to market for launching new services Improve stability and reliability of the applications Introduce process culture in IT

The Brinker Experience After a thorough evaluation process, we identified Cognizant Technology Solutions for the following reasons: Experienced player in the outsourcing arena. Excellent customer retention and referral Well defined processes that are ISO 9001 certified and CMM Level 5 assessed Good communications infrastructure and highly-qualified and experienced technical and managerial personnel Outsourcing model. The scalability of resources.

The Brinker Experience Kicked off the project in October 1999 at Dallas for application value management of Brinker Store System (size: 6453 FP) Brinker Catering System (size: 5003 FP) Set up a simulate lab offshore creating a trusted and highly secure physical and electronic environment Clearly defined configuration management, replication and source code management

The Brinker Experience Production Beta Sites Onsite Iterative Development Requirements Gathering Analysis / Prototyping High Level Design Acceptance Testing Offshore High Level Design Detailed Design Construction Testing - Integral / System

Outsourcing Onsite-Offshore Composition for Typical Development

Staffing Patterns

Case Study 1: Gift Card Business situation Extremely critical, “must-go-live” before holiday season begins in October Integration with corporate back-office applications and third party integration with payment gateway Requirements gathering began in early June Project size - 645 person-days of effort NEED A GIFT CARD GRAPHIC

Case Study 1: Gift Card... Cognizant solution... Integrated all applications and payment gateway Created a dedicated and highly skilled team onsite and offshore Gift Card transaction data now available in data warehouse Created an application that ensured fraud detection Provided for cross-branding opportunities and special event cards Increased revenues from Gift Card Sales by 25%

Case Study 2: Catering System Business situation New focus on catering business was showing great revenue potential Catering business growth was limited by no software to support their new business model We built 5 different ‘prototype’ versions of catering software to support 5 different concepts with different business models. And of course, no documentation about what was different about the software versions.

Case Study 2: Catering System Cognizant solution… During knowledge transfer, completely documented the system Worked with Brinker resources to establish a consolidation plan for the different version of the system Established a team who became familiar with the current software and could provide support Developed a ‘common’ release 1.0 with complete automated testing process Current release is 1.1 and quality was above my expectations

First Web based project Custom developed Web based financial software using our WAN infrastructure to eliminate duplication of effort and simplify reconciliation issues. Enterprise application integration of AS400 financials and Brinker Store System Where we are: Provided staff with skill sets in building e-business applications. Provided assistance with architecture review and capacity planning. 10 man year effort – scheduled for 8 months elapsed time Project is currently at the end of the high level design phase and is on schedule.

Is it working? Clear backlog of maintenance requests Release resources for focusing on strategic initiatives Achieve cost savings without compromising on service levels Achieve flexibility in staffing – quick ramp-up / ramp-down Improve time to market for launching new services Improve stability and reliability of the applications Introduce process culture in IT

Schedule and Effort Tracking Schedule Variance Effort Variance

Risk and Defect Monitoring Risk Monitoring Defect Prevention

SLA Monitoring SLA Monitoring 25 50 75 100 SLA Monitoring

Keys to Successful Outsourcing Obtain buy-in from within the organization Develop a management plan, including: Strong executive leadership Transition strategy Experienced change manager acceptable to the affected groups and a clear change plan that is funded and resourced Informed feedback and swift issue resolution

Key to Successful Outsourcing... Visit offshore facilities and get a touch and feel of the vendor Kick-off a project with non-critical tasks as the first engagement and then transition to more critical ones Invest in hosting a permanent relationship manager from the vendor at homesite

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