Burger King is joining a growing number of fast food companies that
are standardising their systems on packaged enterprise resource
planning (ERP) applications by serving an upgrade of SAP's business
applications to its end users.
The company last month upgraded its installation of SAP's human
resources and finance applications to Version 4.6c of R/3 in
preparation for an upgrade of Burger King's existing SAP R/3 ERP
application to the mySAP.com suite.
Rafael Sanchez, Burger King's CIO, last week said that during the
next year the company plans to turn on treasury, real estate,
budget management and self-service human resources applications as
part of the migration.
The big appeal of mySAP to Burger King is the software's
integration capabilities and technical maturation, Sanchez said.
Between about 60% and 70% of the custom modifications in SAP's
earlier finance and human resources releases will be replaced by
mySAP functionality, he said. In addition, the real estate
management application will replace a custom application written in
SAP's ABAP programming language.
Burger King was one of the first companies in the fast food
business to abandon a mix of homegrown applications and standardize
on ERP software. In general, however, companies in industries such
as fast food and retail have been slower to adopt ERP technology
than manufacturers, said Peter Abell, an analyst at AMR
Research.
Companies sometimes face considerable rollout challenges,
especially if their corporate IT systems are linked to individual
stores or franchises that have workers who are relatively
unfamiliar with technology, Abell said.
