Modernizing one of the world's largest food service networks

Challenge

A U.S. military department committed to the readiness, resilience, and morale of service members and their families is responsible for providing high-quality nutritional support—ensuring that service members are fit to fight when and where they’re needed. This department manages one of the world’s largest food service operations that is supported by billions of dollars in tax-funded and self-generated revenues. 

This military department determined an essential need to more fully understand who their primary customers were and their patterns of use, internally controllable factors routinely affecting operations, including logistics and personnel, and how to mitigate risks posed by external factors outside of their control. They needed to understand the dynamics, patronage and operations of its current food program due to the size and complexity of its globally dispersed food services across many Main Operating Bases (MOBs) with diverse missions, capabilities, populations, demographic preferences and regulations. Establishing clarity for operationally effective decision-making requires deciphering large, unstructured and untraceable sets of quantitative and qualitative data, from disparate sources, coupled with unclear guidance. 

Approach

Our innovative, multi-faceted strategy is intended to address food security and nutrition, inform and align regulations, and streamline global operations. By adapting leading commercial, industry, and government best practices, we’re developing an integrated, mission-aligned global network of food service operations. Our focus is to provide military personnel and their families with access to nutritious food, enhancing their quality of life while addressing the department’s regulatory and strategic requirements for operational efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and mission readiness. 

To develop a low-risk, best-in-class food system transformation strategy, we’re seamlessly integrating: 

• Global military and commercial food and beverage subject matter expertise in such areas as financial and operational performance to rapidly evaluate data, facility base planning for population-wide food access and security as well as Digital Ethnography for customer demographic preferences and behavior analysis 
• Innovative data science, analytics and tool-agnostic technologies, approved by the government, including: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate and optimize workflows and business processes; Business Intelligence for interactive data warehousing, preparation, mining, visualization and reporting; Geographic Information System (GIS) for intuitive, high-quality maps; and general programming tools commonly used for artificial intelligence and machine learning projects 
• Knowledge Management System using Human-Centered Design (HCD) principles to streamline access to information, facilitate knowledge transfer, improve stakeholder visibility. Our approach brings speed, value and transparency to enable low risk, operationally effective decisions-making.

Impact

This enterprise-wide food system will provide Warfighters, civilian employees, and their families with access to high-quality, nutritious food across geographies and missions. It will also inform and influence multiple regulatory mandates across various agencies and improve agencywide operational cost effectiveness. 

Aligned to departmental goals and priorities, our data centric solution will integrate food services and common components across all installations while allowing the flexibility to customize certain elements at the enterprise and installation levels. It will also provide key performance indicators for monitoring and tracking future food system installations. 

With quick access to enterprise-level data for analytics and reporting that translates raw data into actionable insights, the department will be able to track progress, identify trends, and make informed decisions based on evidence rather than intuition. Ultimately, this will improve performance and drive strategic direction by providing a clear picture of key metrics and areas for improvement. 

Availability of Business Intelligence underpinned by commercial benchmarks and best-practice tools will prevent data siloing, making data easily accessible across departments. This will result in enhancements to decision-making, customer experience, efficiency, financial performance, stakeholder collaboration and communications, and the ability to predict views, trends, and emerging risks.