Zen Corporation to use Office 365 to streamline operations

The move is part of Zen Corporation’s strategy to be one of the leading food businesses in Thailand and Asia in the next five to ten years. 

Thanyachate Ekvetchavit, chief commercial officer, said Zen Corporation operates 77 restaurants nationwide across seven brands including Zen Restaurant, Zen Sushi and Sake, AKA, On The Table, Zen Cucina, Tetsu and Donburi by Zen. 

“We are now capable of turning large amounts of data into usable marketing insights through high-performance analytics, work from anywhere in the world, collaborate more efficiently, and prepare our IT infrastructure for future growth into other markets and regions. Office 365 empowers us to effectively make use of the massive influx of data we receive every day and pave the way to global growth in the AEC era,” said Thanyachate.

Woraphan Thanamthiang, information management director at Zen Corporation, said the company utilises IT in three main ways: data analysis for strategic and decision-making purposes; operational management to ensure good service quality in accordance with its standards; and overall performance optimisation across the organisation. 

He said the analytics and business development teams have effectively utilised business intelligence tools and Microsoft Excel to analyse data from point-of-sales (POS) systems across every branch, yielding insights that feed into the creation of new dishes and promotional offers that better meet consumers’ changing demands. 

“If we can respond faster to our customers, we can gain a significant competitive advantage. We saw the potential of the cloud in our return on investment and performance benefit. We are now able to access data stored on the cloud from anywhere with ubiquitous mobile devices. Microsoft ensures that Office applications stay updated automatically, and with Office 365, employees across our organisation are consistent in the use of the same software version. The latest version of Office not only gives us access to new features but also the ability to cope with increasing amounts of data on our end in anticipation of business growth,” Woraphan said.

The deployment of Office 365 for Zen Corporation was supervised by Metro Systems Corporation – a certified Microsoft partner. Deployment across all 77 locations was completed in just three months.

Zen Corporation is one of many Thai businesses that have adopted the cloud-powered Office 365 service to gain a competitive edge. 

Meanwhile, Tanapong Ittisakulchai, head of small and mid-market solutions and partners at Microsoft (Thailand), said the software giant aims to empower Thai small and medium businesses (SMBs) to achieve global competitiveness. Microsoft Thailand is reinforcing its support to boost the international competitiveness of SMBs. 

SMBs, which account for 93 per cent of all businesses in Thailand, face intense competition and diverse changes in customer needs – both of which present opportunities and challenges in equal measure. Microsoft believes that technology has the power to equip Thai SMBs with the adaptability and capabilities needed to advance in any situations, enabling them to compete and succeed on the global stage. 

“Cloud technology is an extremely powerful tool that enables SMBs to reduce back-office costs and enhance their business agility in response to growth-related requirements. This is particularly evident when we consider cloud adoption among SMBs worldwide, which is on track to record an average aggregate growth rate of 23.5 per cent from 2012 to 2017,” said Tanapong.

He added that Microsoft possesses extensive expertise in advancing SMB capabilities – in Thailand and other territories around the world – with technologies and solutions that offer the best features, performance, security and value. With the imminent integration into the Asean Economic Community and the government’s digital economy policies, we believe that Thai SMBs need to prepare themselves to take advantage of the arising opportunities.