In this blog post, learn how Aramar is innovating through data and AI services.
We had the pleasure of attending the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit in Orlando, Florida earlier this week. We met with thousands of like-minded thought leaders and professionals who shared challenges, strategies, and best practices in data and analytics. From our conversations, we found one common trend – many organizations are embarking on a journey to get access to complete data and insights so they can make better business decisions.
One of our customers, Aramark, a leading global provider of food, facility, and uniform services, gave a presentation on this very topic. Brian Murphy, VP and Chief Data Architect at Aramark, shared about how the company is gaining real-time insights with its own AI platform, Marko. Murphy explained how Marko allows them to fulfill their brand promise of delivering exceptional services where people work, learn, recover, and play.
Before undertaking its AI initiative, Aramark had pockets of data buried in silos across its different business segments. The data was dirty and difficult to access. As a result, stakeholders from business analysts to executives lacked confidence when making judgments or recommendations for optimizing their business units. They needed reliable, real-time data.
Aramark undertook the AI initiative to build a platform where it could achieve a single source of truth. What’s more, it sought to create a way for departments and business units to mine and share data. Aramark envisioned its employees asking Marko questions like – “Marko, how much inventory do I need to support Saturday’s NFL game?” In return, Marko would make inventory recommendations based on estimated spectators, weather data, historical food purchases, and other variables.
Murphy’s team built Marko on top of the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform (IIP) in less than six months. Data flows through SnapLogic from different systems and applications, including Microsoft Azure, Twilio, Salesforce, AWS, weather data sources, and more. When data is aggregated, cleansed, and made available, departments become nimbler in acting on the data they receive. In addition, they are able to build applications or micro-services on top of Marko to create analytics, natural language, machine learning, and visualization services as well as – and most importantly – data-as-a-service.
Some notable business outcomes from Marko are:
- Sales Transparency: Ability to improve sales revenues by identifying top employees based on sales, employees that need additional training, and the health of sales by region or event.
- Contextual Conversation: Ability to allow customers to purchase food right from their phones, leading to improved customer experiences. By integrating their Chatbot with Apple, customers can order food at Citizens Bank Park and Quicken Loans Center.
- Operations Optimization: Ability to streamline and speed up point-of-sales (POS) processes with visualization technology. For example, employees do not need to manually enter food items but can instead use a scanner to identify the items and provide a total cost for the food items.
- Consumer Personalization: Ability to allow consumers to select dietary preferences when placing an order by leveraging Aramark’s deep recipes database.
Since Murphy and his team launched Marko, they have been able to reduce the time of development from months to minutes, scale insights across the lines of business, and expand data access through self-service. And they continuously feed Marko more data, so it can sharpen its skills and grow smarter.
We look forward to hearing how Aramark grows their business with Marko!
Watch the webcast, “Accelerating cloud data fabric initiatives for greater business value,” to learn how SnapLogic can help you grow your business with data and analytics.
