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As a renowned food and beverage (F&B) company that was founded in 1956, we use data to monitor and optimize our operations across 1,700 outlets in the Hong Kong and Macau regions, Mainland China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Singapore. These include Chinese, Asian and European restaurants, quick service restaurants, bakery shops, coffee shops, Japanese chain restaurants and institutional catering, as well as licensed renowned brands such as Starbucks Coffee, Genki Sushi and IPPUDO Ramen, The Cheesecake Factory and Shake Shack in various territories. Online CRM and food manufacturing are also part of the Group’s core operations.

Access to data enables us to understand the customer’s changing needs and behaviors while becoming more competitive. It also allows us to create event-driven initiatives for our festive products, including the award-winning HONG KONG MX Mooncakes, Dumpling and Chinese New Year cakes, ensuring that we maximize revenue opportunities and drive up customer satisfaction.

Growth Pains

Success saw a massive data growth at Hong Kong Maxim’s Group. We currently handle over 600,000 transactions and millions of records a day, and anticipate our transactions to continue to grow exponentially. In fact, we also knew that transaction volumes and data storage would only grow in faster as data becomes central to our entire operations.

The storage growth creates two main challenges. In three years, we expect our fast data to grow five times the present volume, reaching 300TB. Throwing more data storage at the problem is not the solution but will only delay the issue.

A larger data set can also slow down application and data access performance at a time when the Group was looking to become more productive and make faster business decisions.  It is a serious concern as rising competition requires us to be responsive and agile.

We needed a smarter approach for data storage that reined in storage growth, improved data reliability, and simplified management complexity. We also wanted a robust platform for near real-time decision making, so our business can maximize opportunities and drive up revenues.

Recipe for Success

When we looked for the right storage platform, we needed to have three ingredients.

First, it needed to provide a reliable data platform for managing long-term growth and performance needs, while handling peak seasonal demands that are common in the F&B industry. For example, with the lucrative mooncake festival around the corner, we needed a storage solution that was able to handle peaks in transaction volumes and data storage without impacting our entire operations.

Second, we wanted to improve storage cost efficiency. Annual forecasting and budgeting were inadequate for streamlining capital expenditures when data storage and customer needs change daily. We needed a solution that allows us to simplify costs from the onset.

Lastly, we wanted to empower business decisions in real time on their preferred devices. It required a solution that was able to orchestrate data across different data sources and hubs for the various management dashboards across desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Done correctly, it will allow us to immediately understand the health of the operations at a glance and make accurate decisions.

After an exhaustive search, we chose IBM Flash Storage and became the first company in the Hong Kong F&B industry to standardize on flash storage.

Flash Impact

The benefits of IBM Flash Storage were clear. It allowed up to 500,000 IOPS in performance and used smaller storage snapshots. The reliable design, thanks to IBM Enterprise Systems grid-scale architecture, gave us consistent performance during peak seasons and seasonal promotions. New features, including pattern removal, deduplication, and compression, lowered our total cost of ownership (TCO).

The heterogenous storage virtualization capability allows us to conduct live migration using software-defined storage. It ensured a smooth migration and a peace of mind. Cost efficiency was improved with IBM Flash Storage. With up to 5:1 data reduction capability, we were able to boost cost efficiency by 50 percent.

IBM also offered unique benefits that made their solution stand out from rivals’. These included asynchronous and synchronous replication, seamless data migration using IBM Hyper-Scale Mobility and a single management interface using IBM Hyper-Scale Manager. They also allowed us to deploy a senior management dashboard across multiple endpoint devices based on real-time data, empowering fast decision making and making our business more agile to market needs.

Platform for Growth

Data will continue to fuel Hong Kong Maxim’s Group future success. As customer and market needs evolve, we will need to become more responsive and agile. Data will be a chief ingredient in allowing us to address these needs.

Reliable, high-performance storage like flash storage will enable us to scale our operations and meet these needs. More importantly, it gives us the flexibility and freedom to scale and enter new markets with confidence.

 **“Maxim’s” and any name, logo or trademark of any restaurants and any intellectual property right therein used or referenced in this article belong to Maxim’s Caterers Limited, a company operating in Hong Kong, and/or its affiliates.