Jack in the Box contains data in the cloud

A fast-food hamburger retailer has migrated its on-premises data centers to Amazon’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure.

Jack in the Box Inc. is running its infrastructure on AWS in an effort to drive flexibility and resiliency across its organization and offer new cloud-based customer experiences. The retailer also seeks to improve the performance and reliability of its IT infrastructure.

By moving off legacy databases to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Redshift for data warehousing, Jack in the Box has been able to automate time-consuming IT administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. The company has also cut software and hosting costs. 

Jack in the Box and its franchise restaurant operators now use a common operational dashboard powered by AWS to analyze sales, inventory, food safety, and labor patterns. As a result, the retailer says it can focus more deeply on daily business performance without having to perform tasks such as backing up servers.

Jack in the Box is also leveraging AWS machine learning (ML) capabilities to obtain more detailed insight into customer tastes and habits for enhanced digital ordering, dining, and customer service experiences. This includes utilizing Contact Lens with Amazon Connect, a set of ML capabilities integrated into a cloud-based contact center service, in an attempt to better understand customer conversation sentiment and trends. 

The retailer will look to use these insights to more effectively train its customer service agents, replicate successful interactions, and identify product feedback that can be used to develop new menu offerings and promotions.

Moving forward, Jack in the Box is actively planning future AWS-based projects, including more accurate prediction of store-level customer traffic and optimization of service time and food costs using Amazon SageMaker, AWS’ service for building, training, and deploying ML models. 

In addition, in response to increased use of its mobile app and delivery service as customers altered their routines during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jack in the Box also plans to use Amazon Personalize, an AWS ML service for creating individualized recommendations, to present tailored suggestions on new food and beverage options and add-ons.

“By using AWS’ full portfolio of cloud services, we can continue to innovate new customer experiences while providing valuable information to our franchisees to help them operate more efficiently,” said Drew Martin, CIO, Jack in the Box. “AWS gives us the ability to be a more flexible, resilient, and data-driven organization, which is essential for our business to understand and adjust to the impacts of challenges such as COVID-19, flexibly scaling and contracting our resources to optimize how we operate.”

Based in San Diego, Jack in the Box Inc. operates and franchises more than 2,220 restaurants in 21 states.