Cognizant today announced that it has been selected by Riyadh International Catering Corporation (RICC) as a strategic partner to enable McDonald's restaurant chain in Saudi Arabia to become a digital enterprise, transforming customer experience and service agility.

RICC owns and operates McDonald's in the Central, Eastern and Northern regions of the kingdom under developmental license from McDonald's Corporation of Delaware, US.

RICC has 154 quick-service restaurants and plans to expand its footprint to more than 200 outlets by 2020. To help RICC meet the demands of rapid business growth, Cognizant will leverage its deep digital business, technology and restaurant industry expertise to design and build an enterprise planning and management platform, said a statement.

Using SAP Success Factors and ECC software, the platform will be built to provide RICC with real-time visibility into day-to-day operations and quality control across all its outlets in Saudi Arabia. As part of the engagement, Cognizant will simplify and standardise key supply chain, food and workforce processes, making them flexible and responsive to business demands. Cognizant will also enable RICC to harness customer and operational intelligence to drive faster, more informed decision-making, and optimize customer experience, speed-to-market, business throughput, and return on assets.

"The success of McDonald's in KSA is underpinned by our commitment to delivering our customers the highest standards of quality, service, cleanliness, and value," said Prince Waleed Nasser F Al-Saud, vice president, business support, RICC.

"As we embark upon an aggressive growth plan for McDonald's, it is imperative that we deliver our digital-era customers the experiences they expect, while also empowering and engaging our modern workforce. Technology has become central to unlocking the full potential of enterprise resources and turning data into a competitive asset. Cognizant's deep digital expertise and vast industry experience will help us become a smarter, more agile enterprise for the needs of tomorrow."

"We appreciate the opportunity to drive fundamental, technology-enabled changes across core enterprise functions at RICC for it to compete and win in this new technology- and data-intensive world," said Narayan Iyer, vice president, the Middle East and India, Cognizant. "In today's digital era, it is ever more important for restaurant chains to re-engineer and digitise their most essential business processes to improve user experiences, transform service delivery, and deliver better outcomes. We look forward to helping RICC build a robust and scalable enterprise system across its McDonald's outlets in Saudi Arabia, as well as create competitive advantage through process excellence and business agility. Our market-leading digital and process capabilities, coupled with our long-standing alliance with SAP, will help us fulfill RICC's strategic goals for McDonald's in Saudi Arabia." - TradeArabia News Service